Guyau was first exposed to Plato and Kant, as well as the history of religions and philosophy in his youth through his stepfather, the noted French philosopher Alfred Fouillée.

At 19, he published his 1300-page "Mémoire" that, a year later in 1874, won a prize from the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and helped to earn him a philosophy lectureship at the Lycée Condorcet.

[1] His mother, Augustine Tuillerie (who married Fouillée after Guyau's birth), published Le Tour de France par deux enfants in 1877 under the pseudonym G. Bruno.

For example, The only admissible "equivalents" or "substitutes" of duty, to use the same language as the author of "La Liberté et le Déterminisme" appear to us to be: Guyau also took interest in aesthetic theory, particularly its role in society and social evolution.

In L'Art au point de vue sociologique, Guyau argues the purpose of art is not to merely produce pleasure, but to create sympathy among members of a society.

Because he rarely made his political ideology explicit, Guyau has been portrayed as a socialist, an anarchist, and as a libertarian liberal in the style of John Stuart Mill.

However, Guyau clearly expressed republican sympathies in which he praised the French Revolution, saluted the Third Republic's promotion of civic and moral education, described voting as a "duty," and cautiously argued that democracy offered propitious conditions for creative development.