Guillaume de Vaulx is French and lives in Beirut.

After completing two degrees in philosophy (CAPES and Agrégation), he lived in Saudi Arabia before settling in Egypt. In 2016, he defended his PhD thesis on the topic of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity under the supervision of Professor Marwan Rashed (Paris-IV).

He worked at the IDEO until 2018, before joining the IFPO in Beirut, where he continues his research, leading a project on “animals worshiping God above all else” funded by the French Ministry of the Interior, section of religious affairs.

His research focus on the parallels between Arab and contemporary philosophy.

Guillaume began his research by focusing on the history of classical Arabic thought (9ᵗʰ‒10ᵗʰ centuries) from al-Fārābī before devoting his doctorate to the question of wholeness in the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, a systematic understanding of the work published in a summary book form in Arabic with commented translations in French.

This understanding led him to reconsider the historical debates on the authorship of the work and to advance the hypothesis of their authorship by Aḥmad Ibn al-Ṭayyib al-Saraḫsī (d. 286/899), a disciple of al-Kindī (d. 252/866). His articles are mainly devoted to editing the remaining fragments of this author’s works.

He is currently developing a reflection on animality in the classical Arab period, both from the point of view of fables (“The Animal Trial of Human Domination”), of zoology (“Trouble in the Genre, the Rhinoceros is a Bird. The Islamic Beginnings of Anthrozoology”) or the religious sciences (a project on animal piety).

In contemporary philosophy, he worked for several years with Nibras Chehayed on the one hand to translate the philosophical lexicon into Arabic, and on the other hand to reflect on the contemporary world from what Arab cultural production has to say both about art (La destructivité en œuvres. Essai sur l’art syrien contemporain) and literature (La destructivité en personne : Chismah. Essai sur Ahmad Saadawi — forthcoming).