The Harvard University philosopher C. I. Lewis observed in an 11 January 1946 letter to F. S. C. Northrop of Yale University that had Paul Weiss done nothing else, his co-editing with Charles Hartshorne of the first six volumes of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931-1935) would have secured him "a fairly high place in the present generation of American scholars in philosophy." Weiss was, however, a singular intellect in his own right, and his place in the history of American philosophy rests not on his editorial work or on his synthetic abilities but on the fact that he is widely acknowledged to be one of America's great creative thinkers and premier philosophers. In the introduction to his unpublished manuscript "The Offense and the Vision: The Life and Work of Paul Weiss" Robert L. Castiglione says that "Weiss is the most creative and visionary philosopher on the American...