Axel Seemann

​I am a philosophy professor at Bentley University in Greater Boston. Most of my work is in the philosophy of mind, with a particular focus on its social dimension. I am also interested in the philosophy of social science, the philosophy of language, and social philosophy.

Here is a way to spell out the question that is at the heart of my philosophical thinking. A number of biological and experiential considerations point towards an individualist conception of the mind. Mental events are at least systematically correlated with events in individuals’ brains. Perceptual experience is necessarily from particular standpoints and the appearance of its objects is in part determined by these standpoints. But we are nevertheless experiencing the world as being inhabited by and shared with other humans (and, of course, other creatures), with whom we communicate about worldly objects by using demonstrative expressions and associated bodily gestures; and with whom we can thereby come to know facts about these objects in common. I think that it is with this kind of communication that sociality begins, and so the question of how individual creatures come to experience their environment as shared is not only a question that arises about minds like ours. It is also at the heart of thinking about the social structure of the environment in which we find ourselves.

A quite recent, somewhat related but more applied research interest is loneliness. There has been plenty of discussion of loneliness in the media and much work in psychology investigates its causes and possible remedies. But we have not yet got a solid understanding of what loneliness is, and I think philosophy can make a valuable contribution here.