Scott Sehon

Scott Robert Sehon (born 1963) is an American philosopher and the Joseph E. Merrill Professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College. His primary work is in the fields of philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, the free will debate, and socialism. He is the author of Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency and Explanation (MIT University Press, 2005) in which he takes a controversial, non-causalist view of action explanation, Free Will and Action Explanation: a Non-Causal, Compatibilist Account (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Socialism: A Logical Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Sehon has also published in the area of philosophy of religion, with a particular focus on the problem of evil and whether or not religious faith is a necessary foundation for morality. In his later work, he has criticized anti-communism and American conservative arguments against socialism.

Education
Sehon received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard University, where he worked with Warren D. Goldfarb, and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University, where he worked with Mark Johnston and Harry Frankfurt. His thesis was titled: "Action Explanation and the Nature of Mental States."