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. He was chair of the Romero Institute (formerly the Christic Institute). 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.

Paul Lee was born in La Veta, Colorado on September 20, 1931, where his father practiced medicine. Eventually his family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his father practiced medicine for 50 years before his retirement. In Milwaukee, Lee attended Custer High School.

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

Lee then attended Luther Theological Seminary with the intention of following a career in ministry. 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. 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). Under the mentorship of Erik Erikson, he went on to get a PhD at Harvard Divinity with a thesis on Sigmund Freud. It was then that Lee became teaching assistant to Paul Tillich.

While studying at Harvard, he experimented with Psilocybin mushrooms in relation to religious experiences with religious scholar Huston Smith. 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.

Lee was later an instructor at MIT. 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. Lee participated in the famous psychedelic session at Marsh Chapel at Boston University, organized by Dr. Walter Pahnke. Lee taught classics at MIT for three years, then transferred to the then newly formed University of California, Santa Cruz where he taught philosophy, religious studies and the history of consciousness for 7 years. At UCSC, Lee was "instrumental" in helping Alan Chadwick found the Chadwick Garden on campus, which still stands.

After teaching at UCSC for seven years, he was denied his chance at tenure. 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.

For the years leading up to 1973, an issue had arisen on UCSC's campus surrounding a decision of whether Lee would be granted tenure. Page Smith explains in his work Founding Cowell College a conversation he had with the founding chancellor Dean McHenry where McHenry noted the atmosphere surrounding Lee after a class as notably filled with "enthusiastic and excited students". Lee, however, seemed to Smith to have accumulated enough opponents in senior professorships throughout UCSC that his tenure track would ultimately be ill-fated. 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. Next, he went to UCSC's Religious Studies department, as Lee's teaching style was a closer fit to theology anyway, his having been a teaching assistant of influential theologian Paul Tillich and a friend of religious scholar Huston Smith. However, Page Smith explains the ongoing conversations with Joe Barber in Religious Studies found Barber not budging on finding Lee a position, with the added oddity of Barber experiencing consistent Freudian mental slip-ups throughout their discussions and calling Page "Paul" throughout his conversations with him. Then he went to Crown College, where both general faculty and students had voted to give Lee an appointment. Kenneth Thimann at Crown was fond of both Smith and Lee, but Thimann carried the message that the tenured faculty had subsequently voted quite substantially against Lee's appointment. Smith explains that this was most likely centered around Alan Chadwick's Chadwick Garden on campus and Paul Lee's role in starting it. The garden was infamous as a beginning catalyst for the organic movement and for its mystical and poetic atmosphere, which Smith explains many at Cowell were of the opinion had undermined the scientific seriousness of UCSC as an institution. He went to two other departments and had similarly found himself stymied. Then he sought the support of the "Fellowship Committee" and one of its members said they would resign if Lee was appointed. Another person then took that same stance. He explains that the senior leadership in the college did not want to "split the staff" with what was clearly such a contentious issue. Finally, he recounts, when one of the senior staff remarked that he himself would resign if Lee was appointed,