Castiglione, Robert. "Paul Weiss (1901-2002)." Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought Vol. II. Edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond. Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag, 2008. 619-625.

Abstract

The debt that Paul Weiss owed to Alfred North Whitehead had at least three major layers - personal, conceptual and paradigmatic. On a personal level, Whitehead nurtured Weiss' already firm vocation to philosophy in ways that surpassed the encouragement he received from any other person. At the level of concepts, Weiss' various revisions of the categories necessary for an understanding of reality were continually stimulated by the precision and comprehension of Whitehead's inquiries. This debt to the categories of Whitehead remained true throughout Weiss' inquiries, even though Weiss claimed that Whitehead's explanatory categories were too restricted in scope and not fully adequate to the nature of personal identity, the continuity of ethical responsibility, and the character of works of art. At an even deeper level, as a person devoted to philosophy, Whitehead was an ethical paradigm for Weiss. The magnanimity and generosity of Whitehead toward those who offered alternative philosophical visions and the honesty and integrity  of his own inquiries  served throughout Weiss' life as the ethical touchstone of how a human being should do philosophy, both within an academic environment and outside of it. If we fail to appreciate the multiple aspects of Weiss' debt to Whitehead, we will misunderstand two important features of philosophy in America in the twentieth century: first, the real meaning of Weiss' criticisms of Whitehead's philosophical inquiries, and second, how much of Whitehead's spirit there is in Weiss' philosophical inquiries spanning three quarters of a century. Paul Weiss was born on the lower East Side in New York City in 1901; he died in Washington, D.C. in 2002. He attended the High school of Commerce, but left school before receiving a degree; afterwards he attended night classes at the College of the City of New York. After transferring to the day school at CCNY, he attended classes at Townsend Harris High School, so that he could matriculate at CCNY. At City College, he studied with Morris R. Cohen, who piqued his appetite for the works of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles S. Peirce. Having finished all his course work at City College in the Fall semester of 1926, he left New York and entered the graduate school at Harvard in the Spring semester of 1927. Weiss says that he went to Harvard because while reading Science and the Modern World, he realized that he did not understand what Whitehead meant by extensive abstraction, and that no one at City College would explain it to him. During that Spring semester of 1927, when Weiss was twenty-six years old and Alfred North Whitehead was sixty-six years old, Weiss attended Whitehead's seminar in logic. Whitehead served as Weiss' advisor for his dissertation. Weiss has noted on numerous occasions that being in Whitehead's classes and conversing with him was an opportunity to encounter greatness. With the help and encouragement of both Alfred and Evelyn Whitehead, Weiss obtained his first full-time teaching appointment at Bryn Mawr beginning in the Fall semester of 1931. The connection between Harvard and Bryn Mawr was the friendship of the Whitehead's with two philosophers at Bryn Mawr - Theodore de Laguna and Grace Andrus de Laguna. While he was at Harvard, Weiss had met and had begun to work with Charles Hartshorne editing the Peirce manuscripts. After he had begun teaching at Bryn Mawr, Weiss co-edited six volumes of the Collected Papers of C.S. Peirce with Hartshorne. Weiss remained at Bryn Mawr until the Spring semester of 1946, when he left to teach at Yale University. While at Yale, where he taught for more than three decades, he founded The Review of Metaphysics and the Metaphysical Society of America, and he became Sterling Professor of Philosophy. After retiring from Yale in the Spring of 1969, he immediately went to the Catholic University of America as Heffner Professor of Philosophy, where he remained for another quarter century.