From nineteenth-century eclectic philosophy through to contemporary media theory, this lecture explores how French philosophy might just provide the conceptual apparatus we need to understand the epistemological manoeuvres of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. As AI thinkers and commentators increasingly turn to pre-Internet schools of phenomenology, structuralism, transcendental idealism, and deconstruction in search of frameworks, this lecture will reflect on what these recursive manoeuvres tell us about our attempts to understand and critique new cognitive ecologies.

Madeleine Chalmers is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Leicester. Her research explores how French literature and thought can speak to twenty-first-century questions in the fields of science, technology, and epistemology. She is the author of   French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) and winner of the 2023   Paragraph Essay Prize, and runner-up for the 2025 Malcolm Bowie Prize for her work on community and language in the work of Fernand Deligny and Jean-Luc Nancy. Her current book project,   DIY Epistemologies: An Alternative Intellectual History of France, offers a counter to extractivist knowledge practices and the paradigm shift of artificial intelligence through a focus on concepts of amateurism, eclecticism, and bricolage.