A newly completed Yale Divinity School master’s thesis by Melanie Trotochaud makes an unexpected but compelling case: to understand what generative AI is doing to human learning, we should read an eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher who never saw a computer.
Trotochaud’s AI and the Ethos of Education: Reflections on Human Learning Past and Present puts Giambattista Vico and twelfth-century polymath Hildegard von Bingen in conversation with our current moment. The thesis argues that periods of technological and social disruption have always forced humanity to ask the same question: what does it mean to know something, and what do we owe ourselves in the pursuit of that knowledge?
Vico is the thesis’s philosophical backbone. His foundational principle — verum esse ipsum factum, “truth is itself something made” — holds that we only truly understand what we ourselves create. You don’t understand bread by reading about it; you understand it by baking it. Applied to AI, the implications are damning: when we outsource writing, research, or creative work to a machine, we forfeit the very process through which genuine understanding is achieved. The making is the knowing.
Vico also supplies the thesis’s moral vocabulary. His portrait of “the fool” — perpetually distracted, seeking externally what can only be found internally, fleeing from self-knowledge — reads like a diagnosis of algorithmic culture. Against this, Vico insists that humans are “born for wisdom,” possessed of divine faculties of memory, judgment, and reason that demand disciplined cultivation, not passive consumption.
Trotochaud extends this through Hildegard’s theology of embodied creativity and Pico della Mirandola’s argument that humans alone possess an unfixed nature — capable of ascending toward the intellectual and divine, or descending toward the merely vegetative. AI, she argues, is architecturally designed to keep us in the lower states.
The thesis closes with quiet optimism. When humanity has felt its dignity threatened, it has historically reoriented toward what matters. Vico would recognize the pattern. The work of becoming fully human has never been convenient — but it has always been ours to do.
Trotochaud, M. (2026). AI and the ethos of education: Reflections on human learning past and present [Master’s thesis, Yale Divinity School]. EliScholar. https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/divinity_theses
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