Margaret Boden, a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, was undoubtedly one of the greats of Cognitive Science. She promoted and popularized Cognitive Science in the early part of her career and made Sussex University into a centre of excellence in this area. An illustrious and inspiring pioneer, she has also left us her legacy as the chronicler of the development of the field. Her comprehensive text: Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, 2006 covers every component area of Cognitive Science in unparallel detail.
Below, her friends and colleagues remember Maggie and her work.
Professor Andy Clark
University of Sussex
Margaret (‘Maggie’) Boden played an important role in the establishment of Cognitive Science as a discipline here in the UK, and her work was an inspiration to generations of students and researchers around the globe. She brought to her work the sharply honed tools of an analytic philosopher, combined with the synoptic vision of the true inter-disciplinarian and the empirical instincts of a cognitive psychologist. Not so surprising considering she had a first degree in medicine and philosophy, and a doctorate in theoretical psychology from Harvard. Maggie ‘discovered’ cognitive science during that time in the US, where she ran across Miller, Galanter, and Pribram’s (1962) opus Plans and the Structure of Behavior. That early attempt to apply computational concepts and ideas widely to psychology entranced her, and was in some ways the template for her own hugely influential explorations of the human mind, and (especially) the nature of creativity.
I first met Maggie long after those early transformative moments, when she chaired the hiring committee for my first full-time teaching appointment back in 1984 as a ‘New Blood Lecturer’ at the University of Sussex in the UK. I was offered the job conditional upon my learning to program so that I could fit in with the ethos of what was then the ‘Cognitive Studies Program’ – a small group of philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists whose lingua franca was the concepts and tools of computer programming. Eventually, circa 1987, Maggie leveraged that small group into a major division of the University – the School of Cognitive and Computer Sciences, of which she was the first Dean. That legacy continues today in the form of the Centre for Cognitive Science.
Beyond her contributions to research and to the emergence of Cognitive Science in the UK, Maggie was my friend and mentor. On the day I moved to take up my post at the University of Sussex, Maggie suggested meeting my mum and dad for a brief hello on the seafront on her way to work. They chatted happily for about 15 minutes. That was one short moment in Maggie’s remarkable life but that generous impulse meant the world to my folks (and to me). In the years that followed, Maggie helped my career in too many ways to count. She offered hard-edged criticism where needed, and encouragement to take chances, break with expectations, and push new ideas.
The strongest form of creativity, Maggie argued, involved altering the rules that previously defined a space – transforming the space itself to reveal ideas that were simply not possible inside some existing frame. Her own life and work fits that model to a tee. Maggie made her own rules and helped shape the space in which Cognitive Science as we know it became possible.
Professor Ernest Edmonds
De Montfort University, Leicester
Maggie Boden was remarkable. She was a philosopher who contributed, at the highest level to many areas, well beyond philosophy. Amongst her many passions, Maggie was both very interested in and very responsive to art. Given her endless curiosity and the remarkable range of her expertise, it is not surprising that she investigated the nature of art making, and, in particular, the nature of computer-based art making. This she did both from a philosophical point of view and through the lens of cognitive science.
More generally, creativity became a significant focus in her writing. Although we first met in 1976, we really got to know one another when we were both at a workshop on AI and creativity held in a rainforest venue in Queensland Australia in 1991, by which time she had already published her book “The Creative Mind”. From then on I was inspired by working with her on various projects, including our book which she enjoyed naming “From Fingers to Digits”. During this time, she published two other books concerned with creativity and art: “Dimensions of Creativity” and “Creativity and Art” as well as a number of papers and book chapters.
Her contributions were both unique and significant. They extended our understanding of the philosophy of art by using computer-based arts to pose new and revised questions. Digital artists make art just like all those that preceded them, but the use of computers enabled Maggie to take a new viewpoint. The scientific questions about just how these artists’ creative processes worked was another issue, one that Maggie was fascinated by.
She didn’t just consider this theoretically. She was friends with many significant digital artists, including those working in sound as well as vision. Never backward in asking questions, Maggie learnt from these friends by posing clear, but blunt, questions. For example, when we were talking with artist Harold Cohen about his preference for elegant computer software, she asked him why he “bothered to clean it up”, ensuring that he was on the back foot when he answered. However, Maggie was also characteristically direct in her own conclusions, such as her remark about appreciating computer art, “the audience does not have to know the recipe. The most appropriate … injunction … is the one given by cheerful waiters in down-market bistros, simply ‘Enjoy!’”. Although, sadly, we can no longer look forward to Maggie’s next piece, she has left much for the creative world to enjoy.
Professor Phil Husbands
University of Sussex
Maggie Boden was a powerful and unique force in Cognitive Science. Her pioneering interdisciplinary research, encompassing philosophy, psychology, AI and more, did much to define, motivate and shape the field. Her influence was deep and unusually widespread. By the time I first met her, in 1988, she was already very well established at the academic top table. I was being interviewed for a junior lectureship in AI in COGS, the revolutionary interdisciplinary school she and colleagues had recently established at Sussex University. As Dean, she was chair of the appointment panel. Like countless others, I had first become interested in AI through reading her 1977 book Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man. I was extremely nervous as I waited my turn outside her office, partly because I was in awe of the great woman. Suddenly Maggie burst through the door, all smiles and charm as she welcomed me in. My nerves melted away and I got the job. I was lucky enough to interact and collaborate with her for many years after that.
Maggie was always very direct, sometimes brusque, in conversation about intellectual matters. There was no time for unnecessary niceties, the advancement of knowledge and understanding was the point. This became clear to me a few weeks after I started at COGS. One morning there was a knock on my office door and in strolled Maggie. Hello Phil, now I want you to explain the difference between these two types of evolutionary algorithm, she said.
My PhD research at Edinburgh University had been on evolutionary search algorithms, a topic that was hardly known in the UK at the time. But Maggie knew something about it and was keen to know more, not least because of her strong interest in biologically inspired approaches. I gulped and tried my best. It wasn’t good enough. She waved at the scruffy diagrams I’d chalked on the blackboard, punctuated with scrawled
equations. She said, I’m going to have to ask you to go over it again. There was a sternness, but it was undercut by her disarming smile. The scruffy diagrams she could live with, it was the equations that were the problem. She asked me to go over each one explaining it in plain English. Always do that if you want to widen your audience, she suggested. It was a good lesson, and one that was to prove important as my own research became increasingly interdisciplinary over the years.
Maggie had a strong personality, but her kindness and humanity shone through. She really cared about people. After any personal triumph, or moment of difficulty, there would be a postcard from Maggie waiting in your pigeonhole. Not just any old postcard, but a carefully chosen, often quirky, image with a handwritten message of congratulations or commiserations. She was very generous with her unrivalled influence and contacts, creating opportunities for people she wanted to see flourish. Her hand in these matters was often unseen; it wasn’t until years later that I discovered that her recommendations lay behind certain invitations to contribute to important publications, or to give keynote speeches.
Maggie was a maverick, like one of her early influences: Grey Walter, the neurophysiologist and cyberneticist. In 1951 a teenaged Maggie had attended the post-war Labour government’s great tonic for the masses, The Festival of Britain. One of the most popular attractions in the science section was an exhibition of Grey’s famous mechanical tortoises, the first ever autonomous mobile robots. Simple sensors and a small network of electronic neurons generated intriguing behaviours as the tortoises interacted with each other and a light source. Maggie was fascinated by the robots, but also struck by the philosophy behind them: an attempt to understand more about biological life by building machines with life-like properties. This influence stayed with her and helped to form her life-long intellectual interests.
Creativity was a major focus of the latter part of her career, and in the mid-2000s I worked with Maggie on a project in this area that had been put together by artist Paul Brown. An abiding memory of Maggie comes from one of the early project meetings. Maggie, Paul, artist Ernest Edmunds and I, or some combination thereof, were gathered to scope the work. Discussions, gently led by Maggie, focused on the feasibility of creativity in autonomous machines, and whether or not it was possible to create, through a mechanical process, an artwork that did not exhibit any discernible influence of the designer of the mechanical process. As the talk became gradually more animated, as if intoxicated by the ideas bouncing back and forth, her grin grew broader, her eyes shone with delight.
Dr Pasha Parpia
University of Sussex
Like many physicists at the turn of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, thwarted by the riddles that relativity theory and quantum mechanics posed to the classically established nature of matter, and indeed, of physical reality, I too was drawn, later in my academic career in physics, by the prospect of enquiring about the nature of human perception that lies at the foundation of both the formulation of theories in physics and their evaluation.
I began my degree in physics at Sussex University in autumn 1965, in its glory days following its foundation in 1961. This was in the same year as Maggie Boden took up her post as a lecturer in philosophy there. I attended perhaps a couple of lectures given by her as a part of the Arts-Science Programme that this new university had seen appropriate to put in place to broaden the intellectual scope of undergraduates studying the ‘pure’ sciences.
However, I had the honour to meet Maggie in person only after starting my Masters degree in physics at Sussex when I was lodged with the sculptor John Skelton and his delightful family in their isolated farmhouse near the small Sussex village of Streat, near Ditchling.
Maggie was known to both John and his wife Myrtle, and she would sometimes come to their frequent art exhibitions or social gatherings, where I was first introduced to her, and found her to be both charming and engaging, and was surprised and delighted that she was curious to know what I was doing and why physics had drawn me in.
This acquaintance was to grow only a couple of decades later after I had completed my doctorate in physics at Cambridge in 1974, and had continued my research using X-ray methods to study crystal defects in materials, some now at the heart of AI technology, at diverse academic institutions including the universities of Saarbrücken, in W. Germany, and Durham.
In 1986 I had the good fortune to start a Masters ‘conversion’ course in Knowledge Based Systems (KBS) in the remarkable Cognitive Studies Programme within the School of Arts and Social Studies. Maggie Boden had initiated this Programme in 1974 along with her colleagues Max Clowes, interested in computer vision, and the philosopher-physicist Aaron Sloman.
It was a fully engaging course that was, for me, quite life changing. I was astonished by the range of courses on offer that ranged from philosophy of mind to computer vision and natural language processing and indeed by the diverse disciplines my cohort had come from. This certainly reflected the breadth of vision of Maggie and her co-founders of the Programme. Maggie always seemed to be in command either at the lectern or passing by in the corridor, as always, impeccably dressed and wearing tastefully chosen items of jewellery that gave her an immense sense of presence.
I finally had the opportunity to engage with her in intellectual discourse shortly after completing my KBS Masters when I was teaching AI within the department of Experimental Psychology at Sussex. The occasions were often the post-seminar gatherings that followed open lectures given by notables in the field of philosophy of mind when I came to more fully appreciate at first hand Maggie’s formidable scope and remarkable mind.
Maggie had a phenomenal memory that verged on the eidetic. Her mind was both penetrating and rapidly cross-referencing. This was particularly manifested whenever matters she felt passionately about were being engaged with. On such occasions her feet remained firmly on the ground, and she would not entertain any loose talk.
In general, she had a strong sense of justice and was wholly open and inclusively democratic as a chairperson. She would discuss, advise, facilitate and encourage. She was generally drawn to people with a sense of open curiosity, but would not suffer fools gladly. She could spot and blow away any false proposition through her articulations in a single breath! This was both inspiring and capable of filling one with awe, perhaps in equal measure.
Not long after my yearlong lectureship at Sussex I was offered the directorship of the nascent Cognitive Science Programme at the University of Western Australia (1991-1994). Once in Perth, Maggie was enormously generous in guiding me through email exchanges on how best to organise the teaching and the incorporation of courses from the other departments participating in the Programme at UWA. Indeed, on my invitation, she very kindly came to Perth to meet members of the Programme. During her stay, she gave a couple of lectures on the scope of cognitive science and also addressed a gathering of heads of department at UWA on how best to organise teaching and research in cognitive science.
Following my return to Sussex in 1996 I took up a Visiting Research Fellowship within the newly formed School of Cognitive and Computer Sciences, of which Maggie was the founding Dean. This was a period when Maggie was writing her magnum opus ‘Mind As Machine’, and I felt much honoured to be asked to comment on some of the chapters in their draft stage. During our exchanges that followed she pointed out that she was crafting the work to be taken as a single entity; I could see that the content was tightly cross-referenced and thereby bound together as a single expression of her unified view of it.
During the Fellowship I was researching plasticity in the nervous system. I felt that the work would benefit from having its scope encompass all the senses that participated in the physicist’s notion of physical reality. Discussing this proposal with Maggie and other colleagues it was decided that the best way forwards if I wished to go ahead with a larger piece of work would be for me to enrol for a second doctorate to pursue the project. This move would provide me with the incentive to document my thoughts under a well-established format with strict deadlines and reviews of my progress at regular intervals.
After going through the formalities I duly enrolled for the DPhil, and Maggie very kindly took on the role of the chairperson of my Annual Review Committee that moderated the progress of the research. Happily this worked out well, and the DPhil entitled ‘Neural Plasticity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge’ was awarded in 2015.
Maggie Boden passed away peacefully in her sleep on the 18th July 2025. The following quotation was inscribed on the reverse of the funeral programme distributed at Maggie’s cremation:
‘I was not;
I have been;
I am not;
I do not mind.’
The quotation, that has its origins in Epicurean and Lucretian thought inspired by Democritus, and consistent with Humanism, seems to convey well that Maggie held a materialistic stance on the nature of mind.
As for myself, I am eternally grateful that she has been, and deeply sad that now, she is not.
Professor Mike Sharples
The Open University
Margaret (Maggie) Boden was the external examiner for my PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1984. I had been warned she was unwell, so I was relieved when she appeared, hearty and imperial, in a striking purple dress. She subjected me to a rigorous academic grilling and requested minor revisions, including a clearer account of Piaget’s contribution to education. In my naïveté, I believed I had failed the viva. To make matters worse, I was invited to dinner with Boden and senior academics, who spent the evening discussing something called “John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument.” They might as well have been conversing in classical Greek, for all I understood. I felt like a child allowed downstairs to join the adults for New Year. From then on, I resolved to become a grown-up academic.
That experience distilled the essence of Boden as a scholar: her commanding presence, her intellectual rigour, her sweeping grasp of psychology, biology and philosophy, and her gift for courteous yet penetrating debate. A televised 1984 debate between Searle and Boden for Channel 4’s Voices series remains a classic of academic argument and is well worth watching on YouTube.
Later that year, I was fortunate to be appointed a lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sussex, where I encountered another facet of Boden: the negotiator, leader, mentor, and valued colleague. Through sheer passion and determination, she transformed the Cognitive Studies Programme (which she had co-founded in the early 1970s) into the pioneering School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences. There was nothing else like it. Philosophers, computer scientists, neuroscientists, linguists, and psychologists gathered in its “debugging room” to discuss artificial life, human creativity, and much more.
Maggie’s great academic contribution was to show that artificial intelligence is not only a powerful technology (as she once wrote in an email to me: ‘I cannot comment on any of the technical stuff’) but also a working model of cognition and creativity. She argued that creativity arises from the exploration, combination, and transformation of conceptual spaces. Symbolic AI systems can embody and test these processes, providing dynamic models that can be built, run, probed, refined, and compared with human creativity. At a time when AI is dominated by data-driven machine learning, her insistence on understanding cognition through careful analysis of its underlying mechanisms is especially significant.
Maggie ensured we stayed grounded in intellectual rationality and human care, not only through her pioneering seminars on the “Social Implications of Artificial Intelligence” but also through many large and small acts of kindness. She sent postcards with words of thanks, mentored junior staff, and supported them throughout their careers. I remember a train journey where she spoke candidly about the difficulty of being a leader and a nurturer in the aggressively male environment of computer science and AI. She was both.
Maggie Boden showed us what it means to embody responsibility, passion, and care – human values needed more than ever in today’s AI-infused world.
Professor Steve Torrance
University of Sussex.
I first knew Maggie Boden in the mid to late 1960s: she joined Sussex University as a philosophy lecturer in 1965, the same year I started there as a philosophy undergraduate. I remember her striding purposefully across the campus, and a Philosophy Society paper she read in 1968 entitled “Intentionality in Machines”. In an environment then almost totally innocent of computers or AI, the title baffled me – and no doubt most other people.
Weaving my own early recollections of Maggie with some of her own, it’s plain how revolutionary her theoretical and hands-on relationship with machines had been in the years leading up to the start of her long time at Sussex. From her account in the Preface to her monumental 2006 two-volume Mind as Machine, one reads that, after her (top First class) degree in Medicine at Newnham, Cambridge, she began studies in Moral Sciences, joining the Cambridge Language Research Group. Here she worked with primitive computing devices, under the philosopher and machine translation pioneer (and namesake) Margaret Masterman. During her subsequent Harkness Fellowship at Harvard, Maggie joined the Centre for Cognitive Studies founded by Jerome Bruner and George Miller where she worked (via punched-cards) on cognitive computer modelling. So “Intentionality in Machines” was far from a fresh start, but rather a continuation of a longstanding practical and theoretical tendresse.
At Harvard coming across Plans and the Structure of Behavior, by Miller, Galanter and Pribram, “changed my life , she told us in the 2006 Preface. Questions that had been with her since schoolgirl days about the nature of thinking coalesced and moved forward with reading the book and with her work at the Centre. Her own preoccupations at the time (as a medical graduate she had planned a career in psychiatry) ranged from understanding psychopathologies such as arm paralysis, to the work of William McDougall on the nature of purpose. All this work was organized around deep and multistranded computational conceptions. McDougall was the subject of her PhD thesis and her first published volume (1972) – her “purple book” as friends often heard her refer to it.
In the early 1980s Maggie was an invited speaker at a conference that colleagues at the University of Lille and I co-organized. My partner Madeline Drake was also there in the lecture-hall, breastfeeding our seven-month daughter. Madeline and Maggie spent a lot of time exchanging ideas, including about how to bring up small children while maintaining an active, successful career as women and as mothers. Maggie’s advice was memorable – “baby down, eyes down”.
Maggie’s determination, as a prominent woman in a man’s world, was clear then as now. In conversation she made clear to us that the text of her 1977 book on AI, whose title included the words “Natural Man”, deliberately used “she” rather than the conventional “he” as its indefinite personal pronoun throughout – pretty unusual at the time. “One for the sisters”, I remember her saying. Her ideas about womanhood played a crucial role in her career transition from medicine to philosophy. In another anecdote from her 2006 Preface, she recounts a conversation in 1959 with her former Pathology supervisor when seeking advice on whether to keep to medicine or take up the philosophy post she had just been offered at the University of Birmingham. The eminent pathologist observed that his wife’s medical degree – the latter at that point could be seen hanging washing on the line outside – was a useful asset to them for obtaining extra mortgage borrowing. So Birmingham and philosophy it was.
In the mid-80s, I was working for a couple of years as a visiting AI lecturer at Sussex, within the then Cognitive Studies Programme, in the School of Social Sciences. Maggie was kind enough to invite me to stay at her house in Windlesham Road, Brighton, when down from London during the week. I remember that the room I slept in the bed was watched over by a bearded gentleman on a giant poster – the label was Карл Маркс. During that time, the formation of School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (COGS) was coming to fruition. COGS was inaugurated largely through Maggie’s and Aaron Sloman’s visionary and forceful efforts to convince the University that it needed, not merely a department specializing in computer science, but also one with AI teaching and research as a central focus – and also one which offered a multidisciplinary home to psychologists, linguists and philosophers working in the CogSci field. Maggie was instrumental in COGS’s continuation of Sussex’s role as a beacon of excellence in this area of growing importance. As a teaching programme it was pretty unique in the UK, and it produced world-leading research. In the legendary “debugging room” one could pore over code on sheaves of printouts, or chat with Maggie, Aaron and other faculty members, or to the frequent luminaries passing through.
When I frequently visited COGS over the subsequent decades, I continued to know Maggie, valuing her both as a senior colleague and mentor, and as a friend, and frequently attending her presentations, and meetings with her, both on campus and away. Treasured moments include these:
- We discovered that we both had a deep appreciation of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
- She invited me to play piano at her 80th birthday celebration in 2016, in a jazz duo with the late Paul Hodgson on sax – Paul had pioneered AI-generated jazz under Maggie’s doctoral supervision.
- I took Maggie to the Oceania exhibition in 2018 at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly – she was able to display her love and expert knowledge of island life and heritage in the South Pacific, on the strength of her many annual visits to Raratonga. (Her private comments to me on some of the exhibits suggested she knew rather more than the curators about them.)
- In later times some colleagues got together and we organized regular Thursday Zoom meetings with her. These took place over several years, continuing through the Covid lockdowns, and for a while when Maggie was in the Maycroft nursing home.
Maggie was a pioneer in Cognitive Science and AI – particularly at a time when the AI field was a Cinderella subject, overshadowed by other computing areas that offered more immediate commercial returns. She often spoke with bitterness of the Lighthill Report of the early 1970s, which advised the UK government at the time to defund AI research as a cul-de-sac area. AI is now on everyone’s lips and screens. Its global market value could soon reach a trillion dollars – unless a dotcom-style reversal occurs. Maggie’s role in the nurturing and maturing of AI over the decades cannot be underestimated. Her work widely disseminated the important, and humanizing, findings in AI and Cognitive Science across the scientific and cultural worlds, to government and to the public. Her writings on creativity in humans and machines are particularly of note in this respect. Too many now see AI predominantly as a money-maker, and the field will have one less person to defend its human dimensions.
Dr. Blay Whitby, Visiting Lecturer
University of Sussex
For me it was more than a privilege to be a personal friend of Margaret (always Maggie to her friends) Boden. No person, living or dead, had more influence on my academic style and approach. Maggie first taught me as a postgraduate student in philosophy in 1979 and passed on her interest in the at that time almost obscure field of Artificial Intelligence.
Throughout my career she encouraged and helped my development. Once, I gave her name as a referee for my application for a lecturing post at a certain UK university. After attending the interviews, I got a phone call to tell me I had been unsuccessful, in the course of which it was revealed that Maggie had made a personal phone call to say that the university in question could not possibly find a better candidate. Maggie never said anything to me about it but someone close to her did reveal that afterwards she very much reduced her opinion of that particular department.
When eventually I joined the faculty of the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (COGS), Maggie was the founding Dean. Not only did she choose her favourite colour – purple – for official documentation but she personally insisted on the plural ‘sciences’ in the name and that was part her promotion of an essentially inclusive approach. Her vision for the school was that it would help ‘redraw the map of knowledge’ and she worked constantly to that end. She inspired ground-breaking research in all the areas of Cognitive Science. That she directly influenced the psychologists and philosophers might perhaps be expected but she was no less revered by the roboticists. We even had an experimental mobile robot named ‘Maggie’ in her honour – it was purple of course.
With an established reputation as a leading authority on the human effects of AI and COGS at Sussex – largely her creation – doing world-leading research, most people would have rested on their laurels. Maggie, however, chose to enter a new area. Her book: The Creative Mind, Myths and Mechanisms, provided a completely novel account of human creativity. I don’t think that even she realised just how influential this book was. It inspired countless young researchers all over the world. Her theory of creativity was clear and testable – unlike pretty much all of the alternative theories. As has already been described, it drew her into important and useful collaborations with creative artists. Since whole research departments have since been founded inspired by her work on creativity I doubt if we have yet seen the full extent of her influence in the area of creativity.
Another major contribution to Cognitive Sciences and indeed to the sum of human knowledge, as others have remarked, is her two-volume history of the area – Mind as Machine. She fastidiously checked the few details that I might know about with me and I have good reason to believe that the whole of the text was fastidiously checked in this way. Excellence of her scholarship was another of Maggie’s inspirational qualities. For anyone interested in the details of all the disciplines comprising the Cognitive Sciences this is the essential text.
To praise her originality, brilliance, philosophical insight, polymathmatic knowledge, and scholastic excellence might seem sufficient but it really does not adequately capture how wonderful she was a friend. Some of the previous contributors have given a flavour of this and I have to concur in my own experience. In all the science, philosophy, and art Maggie never lost sight of the importance of humanity. And she was, as others have intimated, just so good to have as friend. She was always so very interesting to be around – from my days as her student right through to our film afternoons in the care home where she ended her days. However brilliant she might be in the field of ideas- and she was truly exceptional, she really cared about people. She was truly humanist and always humane.
