by Rodrigo Ballon Villanueva
Ruizhi Ma
Summer 2023 – Ruizhi Ma (马睿智) is a research assistant and doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Humboldt University of Berlin (HU Berlin). Before joining the Research Training Group “Philosophy, Science, and the Sciences” at HU Berlin in 2019, he received his master’s degree in the Department of History of Science at Tsinghua University (2019) and his BA at Peking University (2017).
Ruizhi specializes in Classical Arabic and Ancient Greek Philosophy with a focus on the Aristotelian tradition. He is now completing his doctoral dissertation “Avicenna’s Theory of Color and Color Perception in its Greek, Arabic, and Latin Contexts”, supervised by Prof. Stephen Menn, Prof. Peter Adamson, and Prof. Lukas Mühlethaler. The goal is to reconstruct and interpret Avicenna’s response to the long-going debate on the ontological status of colour, and the physical basis and psychological mechanism of visual perception.
Besides his dissertation, Ruizhi is working on three papers which will contribute to our understanding of (i) Avicenna’s theory of light, (ii) the philosophical exegetical tradition on the Verse of Light in the Quran, and (iii) the conceptions of colour order in the 11th – 13th century Islamic East. In the summer semester of 2023, he is co-teaching with Dr. Can Laurens Löwe on Avicenna’s Metaphysics at HU Berlin.
Ruizhi aspires to advance his knowledge about Classical Indian Philosophy and Chinese Islamic Philosophy, i.e., the tradition of Han Kitāb. After finishing his current project on colour, he will turn to light, probably writing a book on philosophical interpretations of light and darkness in Greek, Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit, and Chinese texts from a comparative perspective. In the meantime, he is working to bring Han Kitāb closer to public and scholarly communities.
If you are interested in Ruizhi’s work, he is happy to be contacted by email: avicenma.ruizhi@gmail.com
IPM Monthly 