# Romain Girardi - knowledge graph

## hub
- **Romain Girardi** (hub): Romain Girardi is a PhD candidate at Université Côte d'Azur and the University of Geneva, researching the emergence of free-will vocabulary in early Christianity, and co-founder of PRAGMA. He builds free-will.app, an open-source GraphRAG platform on the ancient free-will debate, and open tools for Greek and Latin texts.

## research
- **Models of Divine Agency** (agentivite-divine): Following John Barclay (introduction to Divine and Human Agency in Paul and His Cultural Environment, ed. Barclay and Gathercole, T&T Clark, 2006, 6-7) and Kathryn Tanner (God and Creation in Christian Theology, 1988), Romain distinguishes three models for the relation between divine and human agency in the sources: a competitive model, where more of one means less of the other; a kinship model, close to Stoicism, where human agency shares in the divine; and a model of non-contrastive transcendence, where God, not being one cause among others, grounds rather than rivals human agency. Barclay develops the third model in Paul and the Gift (2015).
- **Alexander of Aphrodisias** (alexander-aphrodisias): Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. 200 CE), the most influential ancient commentator on Aristotle. His treatise On Fate (De fato), dedicated to the emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla (joint rulers 198-209) in thanks for an endowed chair of Aristotelian philosophy, is the major Peripatetic critique of Stoic determinism and defends τὸ ἐφ' ἡμῖν as a real power to act otherwise; Bobzien reads it as the culmination of the free-will problem's late birth. Part of the thesis's philosophical frame.
- **Ancient Philosophy** (ancient-philosophy): Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Alexander of Aphrodisias form the philosophical frame of the thesis's corpus. Key loci: Plato's myth of Er, 'the blame is the chooser's; god is blameless' (αἰτία ἑλομένου· θεὸς ἀναίτιος, Republic 10, 617e); Aristotle on the voluntary, choice and what is up to us (Nicomachean Ethics III.1-5) and on future contingents (De interpretatione 9); Chrysippus on fate and the cylinder (Cicero, De fato 39-43); Epictetus on προαίρεσις; Middle-Platonist conditional fate (Alcinous, Didaskalikos 26); Alexander's On Fate, dedicated to Septimius Severus and Caracalla (198-209).
- **Andreas Dettwiler** (andreas-dettwiler): Andreas Dettwiler, New Testament scholar (Johannine and Pauline literature, early Christianity in the Greco-Roman world, hermeneutics), professor at the Neuchâtel faculty (1997-2004), then at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Geneva (2004-2025, dean 2009-2013), honorary professor since October 2025. Thesis director at Geneva, co-supervising Romain's doctoral research in cotutelle with Arnaud Zucker.
- **Aristotle** (aristotle): Aristotle (384-322 BCE), whose analyses of the voluntary (ἑκών, ἑκούσιον) and of deliberate choice (προαίρεσις) in Nicomachean Ethics III.1-5 supply much of the vocabulary the whole ancient debate inherits, while De interpretatione 9 (the sea battle) sets the problem of future contingents behind logical determinism. Part of the philosophical frame of the thesis alongside Plato, the Stoics, and Alexander of Aphrodisias.
- **Arnaud Zucker** (arnaud-zucker): Arnaud Zucker, professor of ancient Greek at Université Côte d'Azur and member of CEPAM UMR 7264, specialist of ancient zoology and of the transmission of scientific knowledge, author of Les classes zoologiques en Grèce ancienne (2005) and head of the international network ZOOMATHIA. Thesis director at CEPAM, Université Côte d'Azur, co-supervising Romain's doctoral research in cotutelle with Andreas Dettwiler.
- **αὐτεξούσιον (self-determination)** (autexousion): The guarantee-term of the nexus, drawn from Middle-Platonist conditional-fate doctrine (Alcinous): 'self-determination' or 'what is in one's own power,' never a neutral synonym for 'free will.' After Telfer ('Autexousia', JTS n.s. 8, 1957, 123-129), Justin uses the term without having coined it. The adjective is attested before Christian use (Musonius, fr. 12; Epictetus, Diss. 4.1.62; Diodorus 14.105; Josephus). Christian loci: Justin, Dial. 88.5, 102.4, 141.1; Tatian, Or. 7 and 11. Theophilus couples ἐλεύθερον and αὐτεξούσιον into a shared koine (Ad Autolycum 2.27), and Origen treats the concept at length (On First Principles 3.1).
- **Biblical Studies** (biblical-studies): Paul's letters (Romans, 1 Corinthians, Philippians, Ephesians, the last of disputed authorship) are part of the thesis's corpus. Key passages for the debate: enslavement to sin or to God (Rom 6:16-22), the divided self (Rom 7:14-25), Pharaoh's hardening and the potter (Rom 9:14-23), 'God works in you both to will and to work' (Phil 2:12-13), salvation by grace for good works (Eph 2:8-10). Recent frame: Barclay and Gathercole, Divine and Human Agency in Paul and His Cultural Environment (2006); Barclay, Paul and the Gift (2015).
- **Susanne Bobzien** (bobzien): Susanne Bobzien (b. 1960), philosopher (Oxford, Yale, then All Souls College, Oxford), Fellow of the British Academy. Romain's most-cited author and main methodological ally: her 1998 hermeneutic strategy (Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy; 'The Inadvertent Conception and Late Birth of the Free-Will Problem', Phronesis 43), her typologies, and her Same / Different Person Principle anchor his analytic method. Bobzien herself names Justin and Tatian as the point where ἐλεύθερος enters the τὸ ἐφ' ἡμῖν debate.
- **CEPAM UMR 7264** (cepam): CEPAM (Cultures et Environnements. Préhistoire, Antiquité, Moyen Âge), UMR 7264, the joint CNRS and Université Côte d'Azur research unit on the Saint-Jean-d'Angély campus in Nice, which studies past societies and their environments from the Palaeolithic to the Middle Ages through cultural, biological and geological archives, including an 'Images, Texts & Monuments' team. It hosts the thesis.
- **Classical NLP** (classical-nlp): Natural-language processing for Ancient Greek and Latin: OCR and recovery of legacy-encoded text, lemmatization and morphological analysis, TEI encoding of critical editions, and retrieval over classical and patristic corpora. The field builds on open resources such as the Perseus Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency Treebank and the Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK). Romain's own bricks: regreek for pre-Unicode Greek fonts, diorthosis for the apparatus criticus, the Lemmatika lemmatizer and the lemmatized corpus behind free-will.app.
- **Athenagoras** (corpus-athenagoras): Athenagoras of Athens, second-century Christian apologist, author of the Legatio pro Christianis (Embassy for the Christians), addressed to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus around 176-177; the treatise On the Resurrection transmitted under his name is of disputed authenticity. Included in the thesis's corpus.
- **Justin Martyr** (corpus-justin): Justin Martyr (c. 100-c. 165), philosopher converted to Christianity and martyred in Rome: his First Apology (c. 150-155, addressed to Antoninus Pius), Second Apology and Dialogue with Trypho. He uses the term αὐτεξούσιον, which he did not coin (Telfer): in Dial. 141,1 God makes angels and humans αὐτεξουσίους πρὸς δικαιοπραξίαν, 'self-determining for righteous action'.
- **Origen** (corpus-origen): Origen (c. 185-c. 253), of Alexandria and later Caesarea. His Peri Archon III.1, on τὸ αὐτεξούσιον, survives in Greek through the Philocalia (ch. 21) beside Rufinus' Latin translation of 397; his Commentary on Romans survives mainly in Rufinus' abridged Latin version, with Greek fragments.
- **Paul's Letters** (corpus-paul): Romans 5, 7, 8, 9-11; 1 Corinthians 8-9; Philippians 2; Ephesians 1-2, the Pauline corpus of the thesis. Neither προαίρεσις nor αὐτεξούσιος occurs in the New Testament. His rare ἑκών means 'willingly' (1 Cor 9,17: εἰ γὰρ ἑκὼν τοῦτο πράσσω; Rom 8,20: creation subjected οὐχ ἑκοῦσα), and his humanity stands under a master, enslaved either to sin or to God (Rom 6).
- **Tatian** (corpus-tatian): Tatian the Assyrian, second-century Christian apologist, pupil of Justin Martyr in Rome, later linked by Irenaeus to the Encratites, and compiler of the Diatessaron gospel harmony. His Oration to the Greeks (Πρὸς Ἕλληνας) is studied alongside Justin in the thesis's corpus: Oratio 7 gives ἐλευθερία τῆς προαιρέσεως, which Romain reads as the first attestation of the phrase as a fixed nominal syntagm.
- **Theophilus of Antioch** (corpus-theophilus): Theophilus of Antioch, bishop of Antioch and second-century apologist, author of the three books Ad Autolycum, written shortly after 180 (their chronology runs to the death of Marcus Aurelius). In Ad Autol. II,27 he writes ἐλεύθερον γὰρ καὶ αὐτεξούσιον ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον, 'for God made man free and self-determining', coupling ἐλεύθερον and αὐτεξούσιον into a shared koine; included in the thesis's corpus.
- **Albrecht Dihle** (dihle): Albrecht Dihle (1923-2020), classical philologist (Göttingen, Cologne, then Heidelberg 1974-1989), whose Sather Classical Lectures, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (University of California Press, 1982), hold that the notion of will is absent from Greek intellectualism and is a Judeo-Christian creation, rooted in biblical obedience and completed by Augustine.
- **Dorothea Frede** (dorothea-frede): Dorothea Frede, historian of ancient philosophy (professor at the University of Hamburg 1991-2006, then adjunct professor at UC Berkeley), author of Aristoteles und die 'Seeschlacht' (1970) on future contingents in De interpretatione 9 and of 'The Dramatization of Determinism: Alexander of Aphrodisias' De Fato' (Phronesis, 1982). Not to be confused with Michael Frede: her typology of determinism, nomological, logical, theological, ethical, gives Romain the amended grid he crosses with Bobzien's typology of liberty.
- **École doctorale SHAL** (ecole-doctorale-shal): Doctoral school no. 86 'Sociétés, Humanités, Arts et Lettres' (SHAL), one of the five doctoral schools of Université Côte d'Azur, covering some twenty disciplines in letters, languages, arts and social sciences, based on the Carlone campus in Nice. It hosts the thesis.
- **Teaching** (enseignement): Ancient Greek and Latin as chargé de cours at Université Côte d'Azur since 2024; French, Latin, and Greek at secondary level in Monaco (lycées Albert Ier and Rainier III, from 6e to Terminale and BTS), 2020-2023; and biblical koine Greek at the Institut de théologie et de formations pastorales (ITFP), Nice, 2022-2023.
- **Alfons Fürst** (fuerst): Alfons Fürst, professor of ancient church history at the University of Münster and director of its Origen research centre, organizer of Origeniana XIII (Münster, 2022) and closing lecturer at Origeniana XIV; author of Wege zur Freiheit: Menschliche Selbstbestimmung von Homer bis Origenes (Mohr Siebeck, 2022). He labels Paul's position 'biblical compatibilism' and Origen's 'libertarian with compatibilist tendencies'; Romain's Boston College paper refines these labels through the mechanism of inversion he finds in Origen's reading of Romans 9.
- **Jean-Baptiste Gourinat** (gourinat): Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, CNRS research director at the Centre Léon Robin (Sorbonne Université), historian of Stoicism (La dialectique des stoïciens, Vrin, 2000). The thesis mobilizes his article 'La prohairesis chez Épictète: décision, volonté ou personne morale?' (Philosophie antique 5, 2005, 93-134), which traces how Epictetus took προαίρεσις over from Aristotle and transformed it, from a single decision to the faculty of deciding.
- **εἱμαρμένη (Stoic fate)** (heimarmene): Εἱμαρμένη, Latin fatum: the Stoic name for universal physical determinism, the nomological pole of Romain's typology of determinism, and the target of the anti-fatalist polemic that drives the apologists toward αὐτεξούσιον. Chrysippus defines it as an everlasting, ordered chain of causes (Gellius, Attic Nights 7.2; Aetius 1.28.4) and saves responsibility through the cylinder analogy (Cicero, De fato 39-43); Alexander of Aphrodisias attacks it in On Fate (198-209). On the Christian side, Justin rejects fate in 1 Apology 43, and Tatian holds that the Logos foretells the future not by fate (οὐ καθ' εἱμαρμένην) but by the self-determining judgement of those who choose (Oration 7).
- **ἑκών / ἑκούσιος (willingly)** (hekon): 'Willingly', 'voluntary': a term Romain is careful to distinguish from an autonomous will. Aristotle sets out the voluntary (τὸ ἑκούσιον) in Nicomachean Ethics III.1 (1109b30-1111b3): an act whose origin lies in the agent, who knows the particular circumstances (1111a22-24), and the condition of praise and blame. Paul uses ἑκών in 1 Cor 9:17 (preaching willingly or unwillingly, ἄκων) and Rom 8:20 (creation subjected οὐχ ἑκοῦσα, not willingly), and κατὰ ἑκούσιον in Philemon 14, as the opposite of compulsion (κατὰ ἀνάγκην).
- **liberum arbitrium / voluntas** (liberum-arbitrium): liberum arbitrium and voluntas, the Latin conventional pair. Voluntas is not 'the will' as a faculty. Tertullian is credited with the first Latin rendering of αὐτεξούσιον as liberum arbitrium, a 'free judgement' rather than a faculty of willing; Augustine's De libero arbitrio (begun 388, finished c. 395) fixes the pair for the Latin West. For Dihle (The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982), the concept of will as such appears only with Augustine, a reading Frede (2011) explicitly contests.
- **Method** (methode): Romain's double apparatus: a historical method that reads texts within their own frame and resists teleology at all costs, treating ideas as contingent, polemically-motivated moves; and an analytic method that uses contemporary free-will philosophy as an interpretive instrument, accountable at every step to the Greek (τὸ ἐφ' ἡμῖν, αἴτιος, τὰ ἐναντία). Following Susanne Bobzien's burden of proof, he refuses to attribute indeterminist liberty to a text 'as long as there is neither textual proof nor philosophical reason' to do so; paraenesis does not prove libertarianism. The philological standard: critical editions only (for Justin, Marcovich's Apologiae, 1994, and Dialogus cum Tryphone, 1997, Patristische Texte und Studien), citations in the original language with English translation, never reconstructed Greek. A zero-hallucination protocol.
- **Michael Frede** (michael-frede): Michael Frede (1940-2007), historian of ancient philosophy, whose posthumous Sather Classical Lectures, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought (ed. A. A. Long, University of California Press, 2011), hold that Epictetus is the 'designer' of free will, a philosophical discovery later passed on to the Christians and to Augustine.
- **Origenality** (origenality): A bibliographic map of Origen studies, live at origenality.com: what has been written on Origen of Alexandria, where scholarship is dense and where it is thin. Ten open sources (45,685 records) are federated and deduplicated into 42,210 works, classified by theme, work of Origen and approach; the public explorer shows a 2,490-record snapshot. It measures density, not originality, and serves the thesis's work on Origen and the Boston College paper on Romans 9.
- **Academic Path** (parcours): From a Baccalauréat ES European section in Monaco (2012) through a Licence and Master II Recherche in classics at Université Côte d'Azur, a Master of theology by equivalence (Faculty of Theology, University of Geneva), to the 2023-2027 doctoral contract in cotutelle between CEPAM UMR 7264 and the University of Geneva. Along the way: applied theology at IBTI (International Bible Training Institute, Burgess Hill, England), agrégation preparation, and a growing teaching practice that runs parallel to the research.
- **Patristics** (patristics): One of the research areas of this graph, covering the early Christian authors in the thesis's corpus: Justin Martyr (martyred in Rome c. 165; Apologies, Dialogue with Trypho), his pupil Tatian (Oration to the Greeks), Athenagoras of Athens (Embassy for the Christians, c. 177), Theophilus of Antioch (To Autolycus, c. 180) and Origen of Alexandria (c. 185-c. 253; On First Principles, whose Book 3.1 on self-determination survives in Greek through the Philocalia, chapter 21).
- **PhD Thesis** (phd-thesis): Doctoral thesis, Human Freedom in Early Christian Authors: Anthropology and Exegesis of Paul's Writings and Early Reception, on the emergence of free-will vocabulary (αὐτεξούσιον) from Paul to Justin Martyr and Origen, carried out at CEPAM UMR 7264 (Université Côte d'Azur) in cotutelle with the University of Geneva under the supervision of Arnaud Zucker and Andreas Dettwiler, 2023-2027. The thesis opens on Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste and refuses any teleological history: 'history goes nowhere, and it certainly does not culminate with us.'
- **Plato** (plato): Plato (c. 428/427-348/347 BCE), part of the philosophical frame of the thesis: in the Myth of Er (Republic X, 617e), the souls choose their next lives and the herald proclaims αἰτία ἑλομένου· θεὸς ἀναίτιος, 'the responsibility lies with the one who chooses; god is not responsible', a locus classicus of the ancient debate on responsibility and of theodicy.
- **προαίρεσις (deliberate choice)** (proairesis): Aristotelian in origin, προαίρεσις names the deliberative faculty of choice, defined as deliberate desire of things up to us (βουλευτικὴ ὄρεξις τῶν ἐφ' ἡμῖν, Nicomachean Ethics III.3, 1113a10-11) and re-centred by Epictetus. Romain insists on 'choice' or 'deliberate choice' as the only accurate rendering, never 'will,' a concept absent from this Greek term. In the Frankfurt paper, προαίρεσις is one of three terms of distinct origin that Justin and Tatian weld into a single nexus: God made angels and humans ἐν ἐλευθέρᾳ προαιρέσει καὶ αὐτεξουσίους (Justin, Dial. 88.5); the good is accomplished τῇ ἐλευθερίᾳ τῆς προαιρέσεως (Tatian, Or. 7). The thesis mobilizes Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, 'La prohairesis chez Épictète : décision, volonté, ou personne morale ?', Philosophie antique 5 (2005).
- **Moral Responsibility: RM1/RM2** (responsabilite-morale): The real stake of any free-will doctrine, in Romain's reading: safeguarding moral responsibility. He distinguishes RM1 (libertarian responsibility, requiring a real capacity to do otherwise in the exact same circumstances) from RM2 (compatibilist responsibility, requiring only that the act be voluntary and free of constraint), a distinction articulated alongside Bobzien's Same Person Principle and Different Person Principle. Compare Bobzien's contrast between responsibility grounded on the agent's causal role and responsibility grounded on the ability to do otherwise ('Did Epicurus Discover the Free-Will Problem?', Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 19, 2000; Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility, OUP, 2021). Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics III.1-5 is the first extended ancient treatment of praise, blame and the voluntary.
- **Stoicism** (stoicism): The Stoics (Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, Chrysippus; under the Empire Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius) are part of the thesis's philosophical frame. Their εἱμαρμένη (fate), the unbroken chain of causes governing all things, belongs to the technical lexicon studied by the thesis; Chrysippus nonetheless held that what depends on us (τὸ ἐφ' ἡμῖν) is compatible with fate, as his cylinder analogy shows (Cicero, De fato 42-43). Epictetus re-centres ethics on προαίρεσις.
- **Constructing Christian Liberty** (talk-frankfurt): 'Constructing Christian Liberty: The Terminological Nexus of ἐλευθερία and προαίρεσις in Justin Martyr and Tatian', given on 30 May 2026 at the conference (Re-)Constructing Ἐλευθερία and Libertas, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. Justin and Tatian weld three terms of distinct origin: προαίρεσις (the faculty, Aristotelian, re-centred by Epictetus), ἐλευθερία (the predicate, from civic to metaphysical) and τὸ αὐτεξούσιον (the guarantee, from Alcinous' conditional fate). Tatian's ἐλευθερία τῆς προαιρέσεως (Oratio 7) is its first fixed syntagm. They hold the incompatibilist datum (1 Apol. 43,4) without a theory of agent causality: 'libertarian' would be anachronistic. Proceedings: Mohr Siebeck.
- **Inverting Paul: How the Clay Came to Shape the Potter** (talk-origeniana): Given at Origeniana XIV (Boston College, 10-14 August 2026, 'Origen and the Development of Christian Thought'). Origen's reading of Romans 9 is a reversal, through three operations governed by non-contradiction (Princ. III.1.21): the determinist clauses go to an objector, though Rom 9,18 (ἄρα οὖν) is Paul's own conclusion; 'hardening' turns figurative, agency sliding onto the middle σκληρυνόμενον, 'hardening himself', which Rufinus' Latin cannot render; potter and clay swap causes via 2 Tim 2,20-21, the vessel 'purifying itself'. Refining Fürst and Belcastro, 'inversion' names at the propositional level what 'normalization' misses at the conceptual level.
- **William Telfer** (telfer): William Telfer (1886-1968), Cambridge patristic scholar (Ely Professor of Divinity 1944-1947, Master of Selwyn College 1947-1956), whose article 'Autexousia' (Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 8, 1957, 123-129), on the use of the term αὐτεξούσιον in Justin, who did not coin it.
- **τὸ ἐφ' ἡμῖν (what depends on us)** (to-eph-hemin): 'What depends on us': for Romain, the true locus of the ancient debate on responsibility, not ἐλευθερία. Romain's analytic method holds itself accountable at every step to this term, alongside αἴτιος and τὰ ἐναντία. Classic loci: Aristotle defines προαίρεσις as deliberate desire of things up to us, βουλευτικὴ ὄρεξις τῶν ἐφ' ἡμῖν (EN III.3, 1113a10-11), and holds that where acting is up to us, so is not acting (1113b7-8); Epictetus opens the Handbook by dividing things into ἐφ' ἡμῖν and οὐκ ἐφ' ἡμῖν (Ench. 1.1); Alexander of Aphrodisias defends it against the Stoics in On Fate. Key study: Bobzien, 'The Inadvertent Conception and Late Birth of the Free-Will Problem', Phronesis 43 (1998) 133-175.
- **Typology of Determinism and Free Will** (typologie-determinisme): Romain's conceptual grid, adapted from Dorothea Frede's typology of determinism, distinguishes nomological/causal determinism (Stoic εἱμαρμένη, Chrysippus' chain of causes), logical determinism (future contingents, Aristotle's sea battle, De interpretatione 9, 18a28-19b4), theological determinism (foreknowledge, theodicy), and ethical determinism (psychic, sociological, astrological). Crossed with the typology of liberty of Susanne Bobzien's Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy (Oxford, 1998), it separates libertarian/incompatibilist liberty (the ability to do otherwise, indifference) from compatibilist liberty (a conditional power to do otherwise, a psyche itself determined) and liberties compatible with both.
- **Université Côte d'Azur** (universite-cote-dazur): Université Côte d'Azur, in Nice: a university federation from 2015, which on 1 January 2020 replaced the Université Nice Sophia Antipolis as a single institution. Home institution of the thesis and of the CEPAM lab.
- **University of Geneva** (universite-geneve): University of Geneva, founded in 1559 by John Calvin as the Académie de Genève; its Faculty of Theology is the cotutelle partner for the thesis, supervised jointly by A. Zucker (CEPAM, Université Côte d'Azur) and A. Dettwiler (University of Geneva).

## oss
- **3Dme-pro** (3dme-pro): AI-powered 3D scene generator: a text prompt or an image goes through an image model and image-to-3D backends (SPAR3D, TRELLIS, Hunyuan3D, InstantMesh) to a 3D model or Gaussian splat, then rendered in the browser as up to a million particles with WebGPU compute shaders, with a WebGL fallback.
- **diorthosis** (diorthosis): Open-source tool that compiles published critical editions, Greek and Latin, into TEI P5 and AI-ready Markdown: the apparatus criticus is split into entries, anchored to the constituted text, and kept verbatim wherever none of its six convention grammars applies, so nothing is guessed. Backtests report zero structural errors on 6,797 SBLGNT New Testament entries against an independent TEI, and on 6,293 entries of Pierre Plaoul's double apparatus (LombardPress); double-keyed human validation is still to come.
- **free-will.app** (free-will-app): EleutherIA (from ἐλευθερία, 'freedom', + IA), live at free-will.app: an open-source scholarly platform, archived on Zenodo with a DOI, on ancient debates about free will, fate and moral responsibility from the 6th c. BCE to the 6th c. CE. A lemmatized Greek and Latin corpus of 21,000+ passages feeds a FAIR-oriented, dual-layer knowledge graph of 20,000+ nodes, ancient evidence kept apart from modern reception. A vectorless agentic GraphRAG answers multi-hop questions, from Chrysippus' compatibilism and Alexander of Aphrodisias's critique to Bobzien's and Frede's reconstructions, and withholds any answer whose citations fail audit.
- **Greek-OCR** (greek-ocr): Desktop OCR application for Ancient Greek, written in Python on the Tesseract engine: image and PDF input, a lemma search module, identification of author and work against the Perseus Digital Library, and an AI tutor for learners, with a macOS build optimized for Apple Silicon (romain-girardi-eng/Greek-OCR).
- **Lemmatika** (lemmatika): Greek and Latin lemmatizer built on ensemble learning and evaluated on Perseus test data; the lemmatization brick of Romain's digital-humanities tooling.
- **LocalNoteAI** (localnoteai): Desktop research assistant in the style of Google's NotebookLM, but fully local: it answers questions over the user's own documents with cited sources, and no data leaves the machine.
- **regreek** (regreek): Open-source decoder on PyPI (MIT licence, Zenodo DOI) that recovers polytonic Unicode Greek from PDFs and text typeset in pre-Unicode fonts such as Graeca, SPIonic, Bwgrkl or Odyssea. Decoding is a deterministic table lookup: unknown characters are flagged, never guessed. Tables are derived by aligning documents with a reference corpus; seven reach 98 to 100% of decoded tokens attested in that corpus, several on held-out works, and two remain provisional. It also separates the layers of a critical-edition page, text from apparatus.
- **Sematika** (sematika): Cross-platform OCR application for Greek texts, with AI-assisted proofreading, export to TEI XML (the Text Encoding Initiative standard for scholarly editions), semantic search and a REST API.

## building
- **ia-foi.fr** (ia-foi): Independent 2026 survey on how Christians use artificial intelligence in their religious and spiritual life, live at ia-foi.fr in French and English. Pseudonymous by design, with conditional routing, a heuristic personal profile for each respondent and k-anonymous aggregate results; not affiliated with any university or laboratory.
- **Koine Greek App** (koine-greek-app): A New Testament Greek reading and learning app, currently in beta: a reader of the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) with MorphGNT's open morphological parsing and lemmas, frequency-based vocabulary decks with spaced repetition, grammar and parsing drills, and verse memorization.
- **PRAGMA** (pragma): AI-native development studio in Monaco, co-founded by Romain Girardi (research and AI) and Benjamin Mathias (engineering and infrastructure). It builds custom websites, software and CRMs, and AI agents for businesses in Monaco and on the Côte d'Azur.

## concepts
- **Ancient Greek** (ancient-greek): Ancient Greek: the language of the thesis corpus and of several tools on this site (diorthosis, regreek, Greek-OCR, Lemmatika, Sematika).
- **Eleutheria (ἐλευθερία)** (eleutheria-concept): Ἐλευθερία (freedom): first a political liberty in Greek usage, it enters the technical debate on τὸ ἐφ' ἡμῖν only with Justin, shortly after Epictetus, as Bobzien herself observes. In Paul it is freedom from sin and the Law (Gal 5:1, 5:13; Rom 8:21); Epictetus devotes Discourses 4.1 to it as the freedom of one who cannot be hindered. In the Frankfurt paper it is the predicate-term of the nexus Justin and Tatian construct, sliding from its civic sense toward a metaphysical register alongside προαίρεσις and αὐτεξούσιον: ἐν ἐλευθέρᾳ προαιρέσει καὶ αὐτεξουσίους (Justin, Dial. 88.5); 'self-determination destroyed us; we who were free became slaves, sold through sin' (Tatian, Or. 11).
- **Free Will** (free-will): The philosophical concept at the center of the thesis: its ancient typology from Paul's silence to Justin's αὐτεξούσιον and Origen's system. Landmarks: Aristotle on the voluntary and what is up to us (Nicomachean Ethics III.1-5); Chrysippus' cylinder (Cicero, De fato 39-43); Epictetus on προαίρεσις; Alexander of Aphrodisias, On Fate (198-209); Origen, On First Principles 3.1, on self-determination, preserved in Greek in Philocalia 21. Main scholarly positions: Dihle (1982, the will as a late, Augustinian concept), Bobzien (1998, a post-classical Aristotelian-Stoic blend), Frede (2011, Epictetus).
- **GraphRAG** (graphrag): Retrieval-augmented generation that retrieves over a knowledge graph rather than over text chunks alone, popularized by Microsoft Research (Edge et al., 2024). free-will.app uses a vectorless, agentic variant: a state machine decomposes the question, retrieves through the graph, full-text and lemma search, then audits each citation against the corpus and withholds any answer whose audit fails. This reduces known failure modes without claiming infallibility.
- **Knowledge Graphs** (knowledge-graphs): Graph-structured representations of knowledge: entities as nodes, typed relations as edges, often formalized with W3C standards (RDF, OWL, SHACL) and shared vocabularies. In free-will.app, a dual-layer graph separates ancient evidence (people, works, passages, arguments) from modern scholarly reception, with exports aligned on CIDOC-CRM, SKOS, PROV-O and Dublin Core. It is the data model the platform's GraphRAG reasons over.
- **LLMs for the Humanities** (llm-for-humanities): Large language models applied to the humanities: classical philology, patristics and digital-humanities tooling. Romain's approach keeps generation away from the evidence layer: regreek and diorthosis decode and structure texts deterministically and never invent text, while the LLMs in free-will.app synthesize answers that are published only when their citations pass an audit against the corpus.
- **Local-First AI** (local-first-ai): AI that runs on the user's own machine, so documents and queries are not sent to a remote server. It extends the 'local-first software' principles set out by Kleppmann et al. (Ink & Switch, 2019): data ownership, offline work and privacy. LocalNoteAI follows this model.