Dr Tanya de Villiers-Botha Senior Lecturer: Philosophy | Head: Unit for the Ethics of Technology, Centre for Applied Ethics
Dr Tanya de Villiers-Botha is a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Stellenbosch University. She is also head of the Unit for the Ethics of Technology in the Centre for Applied Ethics and a member of member of the Global AI Ethics Consortium of the Institute for the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, Technical University of Munich. Her research interests include: philosophy of mind and cognitive science, meta-ethics and the epistemology and ethics of AI.
Publications
- De Villiers-Botha, Tanya (2025) “What good is superintelligent AI?”(forthcoming)
- De Villiers-Botha, Tanya (2024). Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education in South Africa: Some Ethical Considerations. Kagisano 15:165-188.
- “Re-assessing Google as Epistemic Tool in The Age of Personalisation” Conference Proceedings for the SACAIR Conference, December, 2022
- Smith, James and De Villiers-Botha, Tanya (2021) “Hey, Google, Leave Those Kids Alone: Against Hypernudging Children in The Age of Big Data”, AI & Society 38, 1639–1649 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01314-w
- “Harm as Negative Prudential Value: A Non-Comparative Account of Harm”, SATS–Northern European Journal of Philosophy 21 (1): 21-38.2020.
- “Haidt et al.’s Case for Moral Pluralism Revisited”, Philosophical Psychology 33 (2): 244-261. 2020.
- “Harm: The counterfactual comparative account, the omission and pre-emption problems, and well-being”, South African Journal of Philosophy 2018 37(1), 1-17.
- “How not to be a metaethical naturalist Jesse Prinz on the emotional construction of morals”, S. Afr. J. Philos. 2014, 33(2): 145-154
- “Peculiarities in Mind; Or, on the Absence of Darwin” South African Journal of Philosophy2011, 30(3): 282-30
- “The Complex ‘I’. The Formation of Identity in Complex Systems” (with Paul Cilliers) in Complexity, Difference and Identity. An Ethical Perspective.Cilliers, P., Preiser, R. (eds.) 2010. Dordrecht: Springer
- “Why Peirce Matters: The Symbol in Deacon’s Symbolic Species”, Language Sciences, January 2007, 29(1): 88-108″
Teaching
Undergraduate
- Philosophy 144: Introduction to Moral Argumentation (Ancient Greek and Medieval Philosophy)
- Philosophy 244: Philosophical Sub-disciplines II (Philosophy of Mind)
Postgraduate
- Philosophy Honours (Philosophy of AI)
- MPhil (Applied Ethics) (Introduction to Data Ethics)
- Postgraduate diploma (History of Philosophy; AI and Data Ethics)