October 13, 2023
Meet Margaret Watkins, Ph.D., dean of the School of Arts and Sciences
By Michael Hagan ’15, ’19G
Margaret Watkins, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, joined Providence College as the new dean of the School of Arts and Sciences in July 2023. She previously was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Seattle Pacific University, a private Christian liberal arts university in Seattle.
The School of Arts and Sciences is one of four schools at PC and home to the Development of Western Civilization Program and dozens of majors and minors. Here are five things we learned about the new dean.
Serious about the liberal arts
“There are two confusing terms in the liberal arts: liberal and arts,” Watkins said.
She’s determined to help people understand them.
“Liberal” refers not to a particular political philosophy, but to freedom. Watkins believes a liberal arts education helps a student to become free — “Free from thinking of yourself as an instrument of corporate America. Free to pursue a life of love.”
“Art” is connected to the terms artifice and artificial, which can have negative connotations. But the term arts refers to anything humans do in a rigorous way — a whole range of disciplines, many of which are studied in the School of Arts and Sciences, including the fine arts, social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences.
A scholar of David Hume
The 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume is often considered first an epistemologist — someone who studies the mind’s relation to reality. But Watkins is concerned with Hume’s ethics, which she describes as “clearly centered around the virtues” in a way that diverges from the ethics of Hume’s continental contemporary, Immanuel Kant.
“Hume’s ethics is centered around the virtues and their connection to emotion. He took the passions seriously in a way that dominant modern moral theories did not,” Watkins said.
She admires the way that Hume, without underemphasizing the importance of philosophical inquiry, was attuned to what people outside of universities were doing and thinking when confronting moral questions. But she also recognizes that he failed in serious ways to recognize the experience of oppressed peoples. She is therefore also interested in efforts to recover the philosophical voices of those people, including women and people of color, who were writing in the same period.
Watkins is president of the international Hume Society and was the 2018 David Hume Fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
A fan of Better Call Saul
Watkins sees practical philosophy everywhere, including on the AMC television show Better Call Saul, which she watched during the pandemic with her husband, Robert C. Miner, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, who joined the PC faculty this fall.
She enjoyed the original Breaking Bad, calling it “an interesting study in the way someone descends into hardened vice,” but points out that Walter White’s sociopathic tendencies are evident from early in the series.
The spinoff Better Call Saul, in its moral complexity, was a more gripping watch: “The characters are deeply nuanced and engaged in twisted relationships that nonetheless involve deep love. Some critics don’t want to admit that redemption is real.”
No stranger to Catholic higher ed
After completing her undergraduate degree at The College of William & Mary, a public liberal arts college in Williamsburg, Virginia, Watkins went to graduate school at the University of Notre Dame, where she eventually earned her doctorate.
She was a philosophy professor and eventually dean at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, a Roman Catholic Benedictine college connected to St. Vincent Abbey, the first abbey of Benedictine monks in North America.
“The Benedictines have a tradition of teaching and administering schools, colleges, and universities, but a monastic order like theirs is different from an order of preachers like the Dominicans. I’m excited to learn about and get to know the Dominican friars,” Watkins said.
A chocolate connoisseur
How serious is Watkins about chocolate? She once flew from Pennsylvania to Seattle to attend a chocolate festival.
“The best chocolate has two ingredients, maybe three,” Watkins said. “There’s been an explosion in the craft in recent decades. My favorite chocolate comes from Madagascar.”
She sees a connection between her love of chocolate and the philosophical life.
“The ethical theory I find most intriguing suggests that part of being a good moral judge is having very discerning taste in terms of character. The same thing applies to tasting things like good beer or good chocolate. Real chocolate gives you all kinds of flavors: fruit, caramel, molasses, tobacco, and more. True enjoyment and appreciation takes discernment and practice,” she said.
