Dr Tanya de Villiers-Botha

Senior Lecturer: Philosophy | Head: Unit for the Ethics of Technology, Centre for Applied Ethics

tdev@sun.ac.za

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, coordinator of the Data and Computational Ethics Research Group, 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

• “Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education in South Africa: Some Ethical Considerations” (forthcoming)
• “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″