Dr Tanya de Villiers-Botha Senior Lecturer and Head of Department| Head: Unit for the Ethics of Technology, Centre for Applied Ethics
Dr Tanya de Villiers-Botha is a senior lecturer and chair 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.
Image by: Photo by Cheryl McEwan
Publications
- De Villiers-Botha, Tanya (2025) “What good is superintelligent AI?” In Maria Fay, Frederik Flöther & Christian Hugo Hoffmann (eds.), Computers with Salaries and Cemeteries: AI Ethics from Industry to Philosophy to Science Fiction, Springer Cham.
- 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)