Romain Girardi
PhD candidate · builder of free-will.app · founder of PRAGMA
Romain Girardi
Romain Girardi is a PhD candidate researching the emergence of free will in early Christianity and the founder of PRAGMA. He builds free-will.app, a scholarly GraphRAG platform on the ancient free-will debate.
Research
- Alexander of Aphrodisias Alexander of Aphrodisias, Peripatetic philosopher part of the thesis's philosophical frame.
- Ancient Philosophy Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Alexander of Aphrodisias form the philosophical frame of the thesis's corpus.
- Aristotle Aristotle, part of the philosophical frame of the thesis alongside Plato, the Stoics, and Alexander of Aphrodisias.
- Biblical Studies Paul's letters (Romans, 1 Corinthians, Philippians, Ephesians) are part of the thesis's corpus.
- CEPAM UMR 7264 CEPAM UMR 7264, the CNRS/Université Côte d'Azur research lab hosting the thesis.
- Classical NLP Natural-language processing applied to Ancient Greek and Latin: lemmatization, OCR, and retrieval over classical and patristic corpora.
- Athenagoras Athenagoras, second-century Christian apologist included in the thesis's corpus.
- Justin Martyr Justin Martyr's 1 Apology, 2 Apology and Dialogue with Trypho.
- Origen Origen's Peri Archon III.1 and Commentary on Romans.
- Paul's Letters Romans 5, 7, 8, 9-11; 1 Corinthians 8-9; Philippians 2; Ephesians 1-2, the Pauline corpus of the thesis.
- Tatian Tatian, second-century Christian apologist studied alongside Justin Martyr in the thesis's corpus.
- Theophilus of Antioch Theophilus of Antioch, second-century Christian apologist included in the thesis's corpus.
- École doctorale SHAL The doctoral school of Université Côte d'Azur hosting the thesis.
- Patristics One of the research areas of this graph, covering the early Christian authors in the thesis's corpus: Justin Martyr, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Origen.
- PhD Thesis Doctoral research on the emergence of libertarian free-will vocabulary (αὐτεξούσιος) in early Christianity, from Paul to Justin Martyr and Origen. Written at CEPAM UMR 7264 (Université Côte d'Azur) in cotutelle with the University of Geneva, under the supervision of A. Zucker (CEPAM, Université Côte d'Azur) and A. Dettwiler (University of Geneva), 2023-2027.
- Plato Plato, part of the philosophical frame of the thesis alongside Aristotle, the Stoics, and Alexander of Aphrodisias.
- Stoicism The Stoics are part of the thesis's philosophical frame. Εἱμαρμένη (fate) is part of the technical lexicon studied by the thesis.
- Constructing Christian Liberty Talk on Justin and Tatian's use of ἐλευθερία and προαίρεσις, given at the ἐλευθερία / libertas colloquium, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, May 2026; proceedings forthcoming with Mohr Siebeck.
- Inverting Paul: How the Clay Came to Shape the Potter Talk on Origen and Romans 9, "Inverting Paul: How the Clay Came to Shape the Potter," given at Origeniana XIV, Boston College, August 2026.
- Université Côte d'Azur Université Côte d'Azur, home institution of the thesis and of the CEPAM lab.
- University of Geneva University of Geneva, cotutelle partner institution for the thesis, supervised jointly by A. Zucker (CEPAM, Université Côte d'Azur) and A. Dettwiler (University of Geneva).
Open source
- 3Dme-pro Open-source TypeScript project by Romain Girardi (romain-girardi-eng/3Dme-pro).
- clicky Open-source Swift project by Romain Girardi (romain-girardi-eng/clicky-web).
- diorthosis Open-source tooling for Ancient Greek text correction (romain-girardi-eng/diorthosis).
- free-will.app Scholarly GraphRAG platform covering 1,200 years of the ancient free-will debate (sources, arguments, positions), in production at free-will.app.
- Greek-OCR Open-source OCR for Ancient Greek texts (romain-girardi-eng/Greek-OCR).
- greekify Public TypeScript app by Romain Girardi (romain-girardi-eng/greekify-app).
- Lemmatika Greek and Latin lemmatizer via ensemble learning, reaching 100% accuracy on Perseus test data; the NLP brick of the digital-humanities tooling.
- LocalNoteAI NotebookLM-style desktop research assistant, fully local, with cited answers; no data leaves the machine.
- regreek Open-source tooling for Ancient Greek practice (romain-girardi-eng/regreek).
- Sematika Cross-platform OCR app for Greek texts with AI review, TEI export, semantic search, and a REST API.
Building
- ia-foi.fr A survey on artificial intelligence and Christian practice, at the meeting point of faith and AI.
- PRAGMA AI-native dev studio in Monaco founded by Romain Girardi, with a platform that arms local partners to serve SMBs.
Concepts
- 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) Ἐλευθερία (freedom): part of the technical lexicon studied by the thesis, discussed in the Frankfurt talk alongside προαίρεσις.
- 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.
- GraphRAG Retrieval-augmented generation over a knowledge graph, the architecture behind free-will.app.
- Knowledge Graphs Graph-structured representations of entities and relations, the data model behind free-will.app's GraphRAG.
- LLMs for the Humanities Large language models applied to the humanities: classical philology, patristics, and digital-humanities tooling.
- Local-First AI AI that runs on the user's own machine, with no data sent to a remote server, as in LocalNoteAI.