Paul Lee (September 20, 1931 – October 20, 2022) was an American philosopher who was a professor of existential and religious philosophy living in Santa Cruz, California.

[1] While an assistant professor of Humanities at MIT in the 1960s, Lee was a founding editor of the infamous Psychedelic Review, started by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) at Harvard.

[4] Next, Lee attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota where he studied philosophy under Howard Hong, the noted translator of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

However, jaundiced by what he perceived was the stale orthodoxy of the seminary, he attended the University of Minnesota and worked on a master's degree in philosophy.

[6] During one of his summers while pursuing his MA, he became enamored with theologian Paul Tillich after attending three of his lectures on existentialism at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Lee decided to transfer to Harvard Divinity School for his third year and graduated with a bachelor's degree in sacred theology (STB).

[11] He also taught and became friends with filmmaker Terrence Malick and New Yorker columnist Jacob Brackman who were enrolled in one of Tillich's courses.

[13] While teaching at MIT, he met Timothy Leary and was appointed a Founding Editor of the Psychedelic Review, along with Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), Rolf von Eckartsberg and Ralph Metzner.

[14] Lee participated in the famous psychedelic session at Marsh Chapel[15] at Boston University, organized by Dr. Walter Pahnke.

Historian Page Smith, who was the founding provost of the UCSC's Cowell College, resigned in protest over Lee's tenure denial at UCSC and wrote his book Killing the Spirit on this denial and on what this signified as an act taking by a "publish or perish" type of teaching institution.

[16] Smith recounts in detail his painstakingly going around to first the Philosophy Department, which had "closed its ranks to Paul", based on colleague Maurice Natanson's intense dislike of Lee, most likely based largely on Lee (as a junior faculty member) choosing to state disagreement with a Natanson appointment to the university, Albert Hofstadter.

The garden was infamous as a beginning catalyst for the organic movement[22][3] and for its mystical and poetic atmosphere,[23] which Smith explains many at Cowell were of the opinion had undermined the scientific seriousness of UCSC as an institution.

At every point, Paul had intractable enemies, people who felt so strongly, were so hostile to him, that they wouldn’t abide by any sort of group decision.

[24] In this work, he describes the apostrophe of institutional educational figures away from their primary prerogative to teach students and their skewed focus on a publish or perish paradigm.

Smith: But I’ve always said at the same time that I was publishing that I was completely out of sympathy with that as a standard for retention on the faculty of any university and I have written articles about it.

It was named after William James, who was a pioneer at integrating social action with philosophical rigor, and initiated what many call pragmatism.

[31][32] In the late 1970s, Lee introduced an environmental initiative to call for a stop to a plan to build 1,200 houses and a conference center on the Pogonip open space[33] in Santa Cruz.

Its main priority was to preserve the 1,500 acres of "green" open space as undeveloped land, where the city would not be allowed to extend utilities such as roadway, sewage or waterway.

[46] Both Lee and Page Smith have had their work with the Santa Cruz homeless population memorialized by having buildings named after them on the Housing Matters campus on Coral Street at the entry to the city.