Ruizhi Ma

Ruizhi Ma 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” (funded by the DFG) 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 color, and the physical basis and psychological mechanism of visual perception.

In May 2025, he will join the Department of Classics at HU Berlin as a postdoctoral fellow, working on the Project "Visions of the History of Greek philosophy in Late Antiquity and in the Greek and Arabic Middle Ages" led by Dr. Anna Izdebska. Additionally, he is currently developing Classical Chinese Philosophy as his next area of specialization. His upcoming publication plans include writing a monograph on Chinese Islamic philosophy, focusing on the tradition of Han Kitāb. He is also deeply interested in Classical Indian Philosophy, especially the natural philosophy within the School of Vaiśeṣika.

Contact:
Ruizhi Ma
Philosophy
r.ma[at]berlin.bard.edu