Ye Xiushan, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, died at his home in Beijing due to a myocardial infarction on the evening of September 7. He was 81 years old.

Ye Xiushan is a well-known philosophy scholar in China. In addition to being a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Ye Xiushan also serves as a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tsinghua University and a director of the Western Philosophy Society. His academic interests have continuously expanded and migrated during his research career of more than sixty years. He not only studied ancient Greek philosophy, modern continental European philosophy and aesthetics, but also tried to integrate Chinese and Western thoughts in his later period.

Ye Xiushan was born in June 1935 in Yangzhong, Jiangsu. After graduating from the Philosophy Department of Peking University in September 1956, he was assigned to the Western Philosophy History Research Group of the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences (the predecessor of the current Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), and worked in the Institute until his retirement. The leader of the research group at that time was the well-known philosopher He Lin, who had explained Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" to young scholars such as Ye Xiushan.

In the 1980s, Ye Xiushan published "Research on Pre-Socratic Philosophy", which detailedly sorted out the thoughts of ancient Greek philosophical schools and philosophers before Socrates. Subsequently, "Socrates and His Philosophical Thoughts" was published. This book adopted many historical materials, examined the rise and fall of Athenian democracy and Socrates' political opinions, thus laying the foundation for the second half of the understanding of Socrates' philosophical thoughts. In addition to ancient Greek philosophy, Ye Xiushan's aesthetic monograph "The Philosophy of Beauty" published in 1991 has had a wide impact.

In terms of modern European philosophy, Ye Xiushan published a monograph on phenomenology and existential philosophy "Thoughts, History, and Poems" in 1988. In addition, he also conducted in-depth research on the thoughts of philosophers such as Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas, and wrote many papers. He has not even fallen behind the fashion of French philosophy. As early as 1989 and 1990, he wrote articles introducing and commenting on the thoughts of Derrida and Foucault respectively. From 2004 to 2005, the 8-volume and 11-volume academic edition of "History of Western Philosophy", of which he served as the first chief editor, was published one after another.

Ye Xiushan's broad intellectual interests are not limited to the study of Western philosophy. In the anthology "Connecting Chinese and Western Wisdom," he also shared his thoughts on traditional Chinese philosophy, literature and art. In life, Ye Xiushan was also a lover of calligraphy, opera and music. He once published a collection of essays on Peking Opera, "Songs of Ancient China: Ye Xiushan on Peking Opera", integrating his philosophical literacy and appreciation of Peking Opera.

After the news of Ye Xiushan’s death spread, many philosophy researchers and readers expressed their thoughts. On Weibo, an old article by Ye Xiushan, "Why Still Read Kant", was forwarded by many people. Some people have commented that Li Zehou and Ye Xiushan are two scholars who are still worth reading among philosophical researchers of their generation. They were not mentally consumed by the turbulence of the times and regained their academic vitality after middle age. Some people also commented that although Ye Xiushan is not as famous as Li Zehou, his knowledge of the past and the present is much better than that of Li Zehou.

In the article "The Hard Work of Doing Philosophy", Ye Xiushan talked about his experience of reading Bergson's "Time and Free Will" repeatedly for decades. At the end of the article he said: "Bergson was 28 years old when he wrote this book and 30 years old when it was published. This is not a young age. Schelling was only 25 years old when he published his "System of Transcendental Idealism"! And I am already 65 years old, and I still have to read these books over and over again. Thinking about it, I really don’t have much future. "This man has passed away, but the life-long works left by Ye Xiushan will still inspire a new generation of philosophy readers."