Prof Catherine Botha

Prof
Name: Catherine Botha
Location: B Ring 706, Auckland Park Kingsway Campus
Rated Researchers  Staff Members

Contact Details:
Tel: 011 559 3403

Email: cbotha@uj.ac.za

About Prof Catherine Botha

Supervision topics: Aesthetics; philosophy of art; nineteenth and twentieth century continental philosophy, esp, the work of Heidegger and Nietzsche; feminisms; philosophy of mind; philosophy of technology, esp the ethics and aesthetics of AI; animal ethics; bioethics.

Full professor in Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, Catherine joined UJ Philosophy in 2009. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

Her research is focused mainly on issues in ethics and aesthetics, with a special focus on the philosophy of dance. Her interest is generated because of her strong background in the phenomenological tradition and its precursors in the continental tradition (most especially the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger). She also writes and teaches on themes in aesthetics and ethics in the philosophy of technology, with a focus on the ethics and aesthetics of artificial intelligence.

Catherine is currently the co-secretary of the South African Centre for Phenomenology, and a registered ballet teacher of the Royal Academy of Dance. She offers free tuition in classical ballet to UJ students at the UJ Art Academy.Her interest and expertise in teaching in higher education is also significant. She was the winner of the UJ Vice Chancellor’s Award for Best Young Teacher in 2014, and winner of the UJ Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Award for Best Teacher in 2020, a Top 5 finalist in the HERS – SA awards in 2023, an Erasmus + Teaching Mobility award winner in 2023 and winner of an Advance HE Fellowship in 2024.

She is the primary investigator in UJ Philosophy’s Technology Transfer and Culture in Africa project funded by the University of Notre Dame–IBM Technology Ethics Lab

Some selected publications

Botha, C.F. (2025) “AI Ethics in or for Africa: Questioning the indigenous principle perspective” Relational Ethics. Edited by Prof. David Gunkel and Dr. Abootaleb Safdari. Springer (forthcoming)

Botha, C.F. (2024) “Heidegger’s Augenblick and the Ephemerality of the Dance” in Martin Leach and Marie Hay (eds.) Heidegger and Performance London: Rowman & Littlefield International (forthcoming).

Botha, C.F. (2024) “Beyond Authenticity: A Somaesthetic Proposal” Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman’s Somaesthetics: Ethics, Politics, and the Art of Living, London: Bloomsbury (forthcoming).

Botha, C.F. (2024) “More and the Possibility of a Non-Humanist Black Existentialism” SAJP (special issue on Magobo Percy More) (forthcoming)

Botha, C.F. (2023). ‘Site-specific Dance and Speaking/Walk(ing) through Rancière’ in Valery Vinogradovs (ed.) Aesthetic Literacy: a book for everyone. Melbourne: Mont Publishing .

Botha, C.F. (2022). “Creativity and AI: A Response to Boden” Social Robots in Social Institutions (eds. R Hakli, P Mäkelä and J Seibt) Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications (FAIA) IOS Press: 204-220.

Botha, C.F. (2022). “Motivation and online learning in the time of Covid-19”. SARE, 27(1): 111–121.

Botha, C.F. (2021) https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ft/issue/view/20269 “Gender and Humanoid Robots: A Sarkaesthetic Analysis” Filosofia Theoretica Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religions 10 (3):119-130.

Botha, C.F. (2021) https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/6453/6981 “Ars Erotica and Sôphrosunê: Examining Shusterman’s Nietzsche” Foucault Studies 31: 13-23

Botha, C.F. (ed.) (2021). African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminism, Politics. Brill Studies in Somaesthetics (Volume 3). Amsterdam: Brill

Botha, CF. (2020). “The Dancing Body and the Transmission of Collective Memory in South Africa” in Prickett, S. and Thomas, H. (eds.). Routledge Companion to Dance Studies, London: Routledge, 22-32.