Robert Miner

Professor

Contact Information:

rminer1@providence.edu

401.865.1871

St. Catherine of Siena Hall 129

Education:

Ph.D. - Philosophy University of Notre Dame

Brief Biography:

I am the author of five books, including Thomas Aquinas on the Passions (Cambridge UP, 2009), Nietzsche and Montaigne (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Nietzsche’s Gay Science (Edinburgh UP, 2022). I am editor and translator of Thomas Aquinas: Questions on the Passions (forthcoming from Cambridge UP), Thomas Aquinas: Questions on Love and Charity (Yale UP, 2016) and co-translator of Giambattista Vico’s New Science (Yale UP, 2020). I work in the history of medieval and modern thought. In 2023 I joined the Philosophy department at Providence College. From 2002 to 2023, I taught at Baylor University, Boston College and Xavier University.

Area(s) of Expertise:

History of medieval and modern thought; Nietzsche

Teaching Philosophy:

Teaching is invigorating and challenging. It’s one of my favorite things to do! Though teachers cannot help conveying information, the primary aim of teaching is not to “deliver content.” It is to awaken latent powers of the mind. These powers get actualized as students learn to read more closely, to ask deeper questions, to listen for answers, and to perceive connections between disciplines. Those who learn in this way will acquire habits of thinking, listening, and communicating that cut across conventional boundaries. “Let him be made to show what he has just learned in a hundred aspects, and apply it to as many different subjects, to see if he has properly grasped it and made it his own” (Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children”—as relevant today as it was in 1580!)