Margaret Ann Boden OBE ScD FBA (26 November 1936 – 18 July 2025) was a British academic, cognitive scientist, and university professor.^{[1,4,8,24,6,18,21]} Born in London, England, she died in Brighton, England, at the age of 88.^[1,4,24,18] She completed her higher education at the University of Cambridge (Newnham College) and Harvard University, obtaining a PhD.

She was a research professor of cognitive science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex, though Hebrew Wikipedia describes her role as professor of philosophy and psychology at the School of Cognitive Sciences.^{[4,18,5,8,1,24,6,21]} Her academic research embraced the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology (including social psychology), philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science.^{[1,4,18,5,8,28,24,6]} A world authority in artificial intelligence, she investigated creativity and authored books exploring AI's connection with philosophy, psychology, and art, with representative works including The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence.^[1,4] Boden was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2001 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).^[18,1]

Margaret Ann Boden was born on 26 November 1936 in London, England.^[3,1] Her father, Leonard Boden, was a civil servant, and her mother, Violet Boden (née Dawson), had worked for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company but became a housewife due to restrictions on civil servants' wives working, later renting a sewing shop.^[14] Boden was the only child of her parents to survive into adulthood, following complications in her mother's earlier pregnancy that resulted in the death of an infant brother at one month of age. During her teenage years, she spent much of her time reading and became deeply interested in religion, biology, and the relationship between the mind and the body.^[41] After attending a private school through the eleventh grade, she studied at the City of London School for Girls in the late 1940s and 1950s, though other sources record her attendance as being in 1940 and 1950 or from 1940 to 1950.^[2,42,43,3]

She gained admission to Newnham College at the University of Cambridge, where she originally studied medical sciences.^{[14,38,42,2,43]} She completed her three-year degree in two years, graduating in 1958 with first-class honours in medical sciences and achieving the highest score across all Natural Sciences courses at the university.^{[14,38,42,2,43]} Her career-long interest in the mind and brain was sparked during her time at Newnham, where she was introduced to philosophy as an academic field.^[42,2,43] In 1957, she began studying the history of modern philosophy at the Cambridge Language Research Unit directed by Margaret Masterman, which was investigating machine translation, and completed her second degree in philosophy and moral sciences in 1959.^{[5,15,2,36,42,43]}

In 1959, Boden was appointed an assistant lecturer and lecturer in philosophy at the University of Birmingham.^[42,2,43] From 1962 to 1964, she held a Harkness Commonwealth Fund Fellowship at Harvard University to study social and cognitive psychology, subsequently earning her doctorate in social psychology from Harvard in 1968.^[42,2,43] She became a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex in 1965, was appointed Professor of Philosophy and Psychology in 1980, served as the founding Dean of the School of Cognitive Science and Computing Science (COGS) in 1987, and became a Research Professor of Cognitive Science in 1997. Between 1967 and 1981, she was married to the author and publisher John Spiers, with whom she had two children: a son, Ruskin (born 1968), and a daughter, Jehane (born 1972).^[25,6] Boden was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and the AAAI, became a Member of the Academia Europaea in 1993, served as Chair of the Council of the Royal Institution from 1993 to 1996, and was made an OBE.^[11,13] She received the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2017 and the Barwise Prize in 2019, and died on 18 July 2025.

In 1959, Boden was appointed as a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Birmingham, where she worked until 1962.^[6] She was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard University from 1962 to 1964 before returning to Birmingham for a year.^[16,5,29,8] In 1965, she moved to the University of Sussex as a lecturer in philosophy and psychology.^[5,16,8] She earned a PhD in social psychology with a specialization in cognitive studies from Harvard University in 1968.^[5,8,31,36] Boden credited reading George A. Miller's book "Plans and the Structure of Behavior" with giving her the insight that computer programming approaches could be applied across the entirety of psychology.^[7,17,32]

In the early 1970s at the University of Sussex, Boden established a cognitive science teaching programme alongside philosopher Aaron Sloman and computer vision researcher Max Clowes, which brought together psychologists, linguists, philosophers, and artificial intelligence researchers to study the mind. The programme expanded rapidly, establishing Sussex by the mid-1980s as Britain's second major centre for artificial intelligence research alongside the University of Edinburgh. At Sussex, she was appointed Reader and subsequently Professor in 1980.^{[5,30,25,16,8]} In 1985, Boden became Dean of the School of Social Sciences.^[5] Two years later, in 1987, she became the founding dean of the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (COGS), which served as the precursor to the university's Department of Informatics.^[8,37] Most sources record that she became a research professor of cognitive science in the Department of Informatics in 1997, whereas the Finnish edition places this in 2002; in this position, her research spanned artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science.^{[18,33,25,8,17]} Her research focused on mental phenomena such as perception, thinking, consciousness, and creativity, leading her to write 15 books and contribute to numerous essay collections.^[25]

Boden became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1983 and served as its Vice-President from 1989 to 1991.^{[10,9,19,4,20,18]} She was also elected a member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and Academia Europaea.^[10,9] From 1993 to 1995, she served as chair of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.^[10,9] She was a member of the editorial board of The Rutherford Journal, published by the philosophy department of the University of Canterbury.^{[20,18,34,21,19]} In 2001, Boden was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to cognitive science.^[10,9,20,5] That same year, she received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Sussex, alongside an honorary degree from the University of Bristol.^{[21,19,30,20]} An annual PhD scholarship awarded by the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex was established in her honour.^[22,23,21] Boden died in Brighton, England, on July 18, 2025, at the age of 88.^[23,21]

In October 2014 and January 2015, Boden was interviewed by Jim Al-Khalili on the BBC Radio Four programme The Life Scientific.^[17,23] In February 2017, Margaret Boden, along with other researchers, participated in a debate organized by the British Academy on the readiness, willingness, and capacity of humans to develop romantic or emotional relationships with robots.^[23,7,22]

Boden was married to John Spiers, a writer and publisher, from 1967 until 1981. They had a son and a daughter.^[24] Boden had a fondness for the colour purple and the Cook Islands, spending vacations there for 30 years.^[25,24] She died in Brighton on 18 July 2025, at the age of 88.^[3]

Boden was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2001 for "services to cognitive science". In April 2004, she was awarded an honorary degree by the Open University as Doctor of the University. In 2016, she was awarded the ISAL award for Lifetime Achievement in the field of Artificial Life.

She is a Fellow and former vice-president of the British Academy, having served as Chairman of their Philosophy Section until July 2002. She is also a Member of the Academia Europaea, a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), and an Honorary Fellow of the Cybernetics Society. Additionally, she is a Life Fellow of the UK's Society for Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, a Member of Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and a former Vice-President and Chairman of Council of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

Boden published more than 240 articles in scientific journals, edited and co-edited six books, and authored six books.^[35] Her early authored works include Purposive Explanation in Psychology (Harvard University Press, 1972). For Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man, English Wikipedia lists its publication by MIT Press in 1977 with a second edition in 1987 (ISBN 978-0-262-52123-9), whereas Hebrew Wikipedia records its publication by Cambridge University Press in 1979. She also published Piaget (Fontana Modern Masters, 1979; second edition HarperCollins, 1984).

In the 1980s, she co-authored "The Case for a Cognitive Biology" with Susan Khin Zaw (published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 54: 25–40, 1980) and wrote Minds and Mechanisms (Cornell University Press, 1981). Her later 1980s works included Computer Models of Mind: Computational Approaches in Theoretical Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 1988; ISBN 978-0-521-27033-5), Artificial Intelligence in Psychology: Interdisciplinary Essays (MIT Press, 1989; ISBN 978-0-262-02285-9), and the edited collection The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1989/90; ISBN 978-0-19-875155-7). In 1990, she published The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (Weidenfeld/Abacus & Basic Books; second edition Routledge, 2004; ISBN 978-0-415-31453-4). Regarding Dimensions of Creativity (1994), English Wikipedia notes it as an edited work published by MIT Press, while Hebrew Wikipedia attributes its publication to Cambridge University Press. In 1996, she edited The Philosophy of Artificial Life (Oxford University Press) and released Artificial Intelligence (Handbook of Perception and Cognition, 2nd Edition, Academic Press, ISBN 978-0-12-161964-0).

In 2006, Boden published the two-volume Mind As Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-929237-0 / ISBN 978-0-19-924144-6), which generated public disagreement with Noam Chomsky. Her subsequent publications include AI: Its Nature and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016; ISBN 978-0-19-877798-4), Artificial Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018), and From Fingers to Digits: An Artificial Aesthetic (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

External resources include Humbleapproach.templeton.org, a critical review of Mind As Machine by Noam Chomsky, and Boden's reply to reviews of Mind As Machine by Feldman, Thagard, and Chomsky. Also available are a downloadable 30-minute interview on BBC Radio Four's The Life Scientific and a video interview conducted by Alan Macfarlane on 20 March 2015.