Margaret Boden obituary

The Guardian

a day ago

Margaret Boden, who has died aged 88, explored and extended the philosophy of psychology and artificial intelligence (AI), and led the creation and growth of the School of Cognitive Sciences at the University of Sussex, an interdisciplinary crucible in which the careers of many prominent AI researchers were forged.
Central to all Maggie's work was the study of mental phenomena, such as perception, thinking, consciousness and creativity, and how they arise from what are ultimately nothing more than mechanistic interactions – either biochemical interactions within the brain, or binary digits shuffling around the circuits of a computer. She wrote 15 books, co-authored another, and co-edited several collections of essays. Her works have been translated into 20 languages.
Her first book, Purposive Explanation in Psychology (1972), was revised and extended from her 1968 Harvard PhD thesis. There she first advanced the novel argument that AI programs could be viewed as a type of theoretical psychology, allowing for the rigorous study of mental processes in abstract non-living systems, with the ultimate aim of revealing principles that could help us better understand mental processing in real living beings.
Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man (1977) established her reputation as an authority on AI. It was a 537-page tour-de-force critical review and analysis of pretty much all progress in AI research up to the mid-1970s, presented to the reader in entertaining and accessibly non-technical terms. It is sometimes referred to as the world's first book on AI; the only other book that might contest this claim is Patrick Winston's Artificial Intelligence textbook, published in the same year. In the closing part of her book, Maggie explored the extent to which various types of AI system could be useful to advancing our understanding of human psychology; she discussed the philosophical issues raised by advances in AI, and pondered on the potential societal significance of the increased use of AI technologies in application areas such as education, law and healthcare and in creative acts such as composing music or writing poems – all topics current today.
The issue of creativity in living and artificial systems was something that Maggie returned to repeatedly over the course of her career, extending her surveys and constructively critical analyses in books published in 1990, 1994 and 2010, and again in From Fingers to Digits: An Artificial Aesthetic (2019), which she co-authored with the digital artist Ernest Edmonds.
Other books include a concise summary of the work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1979), several on AI as theoretical psychology and on computer models of mind, The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (1990), followed by her edited collection The Philosophy of Artificial Life (1996); and her masterful two-volume set Mind As Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (2006), spanning almost 1,700 pages.
As Maggie noted with characteristic candour in the introduction to Mind As Machine, she set out to write it as a historical essay, not as an encyclopedia: it was explicitly offered as her one-person view of cognitive science as a whole.
Maggie started her academic career in 1959 as a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Birmingham. After spending 1962-64 in the US as a Harkness fellow at Harvard, she moved to the University of Sussex in 1965 as a lecturer in philosophy and psychology, becoming professor in 1980, a post she held until 2002, when she was appointed research professor of cognitive science, the title she held for the rest of her life.
In 1974, Maggie, her philosopher colleague Aaron Sloman, and the computer vision researcher Max Clowes, jointly initiated Sussex's Cognitive Studies Programme (CSP), a radically novel attempt to bring together psychologists, linguists, philosophers and AI researchers, to collectively work on 'the study of mind'. Over time the CSP unit attracted academics who were keen to explore research questions at the outer borders of their fields, where their areas of expertise intersected with other disciplines.
By the mid-80s the CSP was widely recognised as one of the two major centres for AI research in the UK (the other was the University of Edinburgh). By then the CSP had grown so large that in 1987 it became the autonomous School of Cognitive Sciences (known internally as 'Cogs'), the first new school at Sussex since its inception, with Maggie as the founding dean.
She was determined that the new school would continue the traditions of the CSP, with an inclusive and collaborative community of interdisciplinary scholars. Cogs subsequently absorbed Sussex's Computer Science Department and was renamed the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences. In 2003, another reorganisation led Cogs to be renamed the Sussex Centre for Cognitive Science, which it remains to this day, as a group of more than 50 academics drawn from across the university's four faculties.
Maggie was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1983, and served as the academy's vice-president during 1989-91; in 1993 she became a fellow of the American Association for AI; in 2001 she was appointed OBE; and in 2017 she received the ACM AAAI Allen Newell award. The University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the University of Sussex have both established annual lectures in her honour.
Born in London, Maggie was the only surviving child of a civil servant, Leonard Boden, and his wife, Violet (nee Dawson), whose first child, Keith, had died as an infant before Maggie was born. From City of London school for girls she went to Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1958 with a prize-winning first-class degree in medical sciences: it was there that her lifelong interest in mind and brain was first sparked. She chose to study at Cambridge rather than Oxford because she preferred the light blue Cambridge colours.
In her vacations, she developed a longstanding love for the Cook Islands, and spent six weeks there each year for almost 30 years: she loved the drumming and the dancing, and was for a long time a keen snorkeller. She also became an accomplished scholar of Polynesia.
Maggie was brilliant, fearless, iconoclastic, warm and funny, with an unquenchable thirst for conversation and intellectual debate. She almost always dressed in purple, adorned with unusual jewellery, and purple was the predominant colour used in Cogs for brochures, technical reports and official academic gowns.
I spent a decade from 1987 in Cogs, joining as a PhD student and ending up as a lecturer. Maggie was immensely supportive. She provided the launchpad, the rocket and the fuel that enabled embryonic academic careers to take off. This, as much as the insightful arguments that she advanced, will be her lasting professional legacy.
Maggie married the writer and publisher John Spiers in 1967; they divorced in 1981. She is survived by her son, Ruskin, and daughter, Jehane, and by her grandchildren, Byron, Oscar, Lukas and Alina.
Margaret Ann Boden, philosopher, psychologist and cognitive scientist, born 26 November 1936; died 18 July 2025