You're listening to the Unmute Podcast with Myesha Cherry. Welcome to the place where philosophy and real world issues collide. Hello and welcome to the Unmeet Podcast. This is the place where I have the opportunity to talk with diverse philosophers about the social and political issues of our day. Today, I chat with Brianna Toole. Brianna is an assistant professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Her research interests are in social epistemology and feminist philosophy. She has written on standpoint epistemology, the epistemic roots of white supremacy and public philosophy. She is also the founder and director of Corrupt the Youth, an in-school philosophy program. In this episode, we talk about identity and knowledge, objectivity, being woke, pre-college programming, and so much more. Hello, Brianna, and welcome to the YAMMI podcast. How are you today?

I am doing well. How are you, Myesha?

I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. Brianna, how did you get interested in philosophy?

It's sort of a long story, but it begins with being definitively not interested in philosophy. I wanted to go to law school, really, really wanted to be a lawyer, was told my entire life that I was an arguer, that I would argue with a brick wall. And so law just seemed like the natural field for me. So I went off to Florida State University to do my bachelor's degree with plans to study political science. But I was an honor student. And as part of the Honors College, they would have speakers from around the college come to sort of speak to us about majors and pathways that were open to us. And someone came from the law school and mentioned that the majors that perform the best on the LSAT are English, history and philosophy.

Yep, that's our selling point. They got you. Yeah,

well, I was like, I've already had English and history, you know, like I know what that is. So why not check out this philosophy stuff? And so I signed up for two classes in the spring of my freshman year, critical reasoning and thinking and intro to political philosophy. And intro to political philosophy was the first time that I had come across discussions about the good and the right and relationships between analysis of values and power and it just seemed to me like something that I needed to keep studying especially if I wanted to go to law school um and really just the more classes I took the more it became clear that I was really really excited to do philosophy and talk philosophy and think philosophy. Not as interested in arguing with people just for the sake of arguing, which is what I thought law would be. If only 18-year had known that's also what philosophy is.