APA Member Interview: Briana Toole

The APA Blog is publishing excerpts from Cliff Sosis’s long-form interviews with philosophers, which appear at his blog, What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? The excerpts below are from an interview originally published on August 20, 2026 and are reprinted with permission from Cliff Sosis.

In this interview, Briana Toole, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, talks about growing up in Chattahoochee, Florida, Left Behind, Crash Bandicoot, geometry, Greenpeace, beauty pageants, money anxiety, Myspace, 9/11, Florida State University and the Bright Futures scholarship, a difficult to comprehend accent, working evenings at TCBY, working with David McNaughton, a brutal but helpful epistemology TA, switching from law to philosophy, committing to grad school and going to University of Sheffield, her first snowfall, Jenny Saul, Teach for America and meeting her husband, pursuing a PhD at UT, sexism and the “golden boys,” grounding, complaining to her understanding dissertation advisor, standpoint epistemology, depression, a fellowship at MIT, Sally Haslanger, Corrupt the Youth, landing a position at Claremont McKenna College just before COVID hit, bouncing between positions before she landed in a green place, her Feminism for Men class, #metoo, Thi Ngyugen, The Poisonwood Bible, Zillow Gone Wild, and cornpone…

What was your earliest memory?

My earliest memory is of a dog we had when I was a baby, around 2 or so. A shih tzu named Biscuit, because she was the buttery color of a biscuit. Biscuit loved me, and I remember that whenever my parents would try to discipline me (at that age, a pop on the hand or behind), she’d growl at them and wouldn’t let them touch me. My earliest protector!

Where did you grow up?

My parents were in the military, and so I was born on a military base in Killeen, Texas. When I was 3, we moved to Chattahoochee, Florida, across the river from my dad’s hometown of Sneads. The twin cities, as we called them, were about an hour from the Alabama and Georgia borders (Dothan, AL on one side, Bainbridge, GA on the other). This is relevant exposition because when people meet me, they always want some explanation of my accent.

The twin cities are home to a state prison (Sneads) and state hospital (in Chattahoochee, rumored to have underground tunnels dating back to the Civil War), which is where most people would end up one way or another (either as an employee or as a resident).

All my dad’s family had stayed in the area, so I grew up surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins. And, because I went to school where my dad did, we had many of the same teachers, and the same high school principal. There were a lot of families like that in Sneads.

The town where I lived was so small that when we didn’t have stamps, we’d just put change in a little cup with the letters we wanted mailed out. Going to the grocery store was an hours-long event, because you’d run into people you knew. I knew a kid in high school who rode his lawnmower to school.

All to say: I grew up in the country. The deep, deep south.

As a little kid, what do you think, or what did others think, made you unique? What did you want to be when you grew up?

As a kid, I always thought I’d be a lawyer. My dad used to say that I could argue with a brick wall. I don’t really think I was that argumentative, actually. My dad just wasn’t used to having people disagree with him. It’s fortunate for me that he found it cute for his baby girl to do so (though he grew to dislike it as I became older, and he especially hates it now!).

I’m not really sure, beyond that, where I got the idea that I’d grow up to be a lawyer. Though I was, even as a very young kid, concerned about issues of justice and fairness. I was very much the kid who felt the need to stand up for other kids when they were being picked on, and I was always worried about other people. Do they have enough food? Enough clothing? Love and support? As a younger person I thought lawyers were the people who fought for those things, and I was enamored with that idea.

As a teen, what were you passionate about, if anything? Any sign you’d be a philosopher?

I was most consistently passionate about the environment. As a little kid, I really worried about pollution, so I made signs and posted them to trees around my neighborhood. I vaguely remember one neighbor – not that we had many, we lived in a very quiet and out-of-the way neighborhood – coming to ask my parents if I was attacking him personally, because things would sometimes fly out of the back of his truck as he sped down our hilly road (I wasn’t.) Then, in high school I got really involved with Greenpeace. I even staged a protest at our local grocery store (the Piggly Wiggly) to discourage people from buying Kleenex products, as they were clearing areas in the Brazilian rain forest to make their products. My art teacher from high school even had her class help paint a giant sign for us on a plastic, white shower curtain, and two of my friends painted themselves brown and adorned themselves with leaves to look like trees. Of course, folks in small towns don’t take kindly to being (from their point-of-view) lectured, especially not by teenagers. And so many people scoffed at the fact that we were asking folks to sign a paper petition while also advocating against the use of certain paper products. My annoyance that they didn’t see the distinction between using recycled paper and using Kleenex products was probably an early indication that I’d be a philosopher.

Why major in philosophy? Did you ever consider doing anything else? Wait a minute, you were there when I was a grad student there! Did we cross paths?

Well, my plan, when I started college, was law school. Having little family guidance, I assumed I should major in political science, and so that was the plan going into FSU. But I was in the honors college and my freshman year they were piloting a new honors colloquium. They would have folks from across the colleges give a short session, and early on they brought a professor from the law school. She said that the three majors that perform best on the LSAT are history, English, and philosophy. Having had exposure to the former two in high school I was least attracted to those options. Plus, I had a little romantic entanglement with this guy from back home who was always ending my arguments with “Well, Plato says so-and-so”. So I figured that by taking on a philosophy major I’d kill two birds with one stone – finally beat that guy in an argument and prepare myself to excel on the LSAT.

I really didn’t have plans to take philosophy seriously, but then two things happened, both involving the same philosophy professor, David McNaughton. I enrolled in his Ethical Theory course my sophomore Fall, and I was so excited to take that class. But, hand-to-God, I’d never met a British person in real life, and the first day of class I couldn’t understand a single word David said. I thought for sure I’d have to drop the course, but I gave it another day before making a decision, and the second class I had a much easier time processing his accent. That became my favorite class, the class that made me realize that I really liked philosophy and was good at it. With regret I admit I became that annoying clinger-on of a student who followed Professor McNaughton as he walked from class each day back to his office (which was no short trek, especially in the Florida humidity). For the record, this is why I don’t complain when students trail after me – I know I’m only reaping what I’ve sown!

Then, the summer before my senior year, I was talking to David and he suggested that I consider writing a philosophy thesis and applying to graduate school. I remember being told, when I started at FSU, that to graduate with honors I’d need to write a thesis. And I remember thinking there was no way I could do that; it sounded so intimidating, so I put it out of mind entirely. But if a professor I really admired and respected was encouraging me to do it, it felt like maybe it was possible.

In the process of writing my thesis I realized how un-psyched I was about applying to law school, and how enthusiastic I was about continuing to read and write philosophy. So I abandoned my law school applications and shifted gears towards grad school in philosophy.

On whether we crossed paths – I’m not sure. I remember really well a few grad students who were TAs for classes I was in. Tracey Mahaffey was one, I think, and there was a guy who TA’d for Michael Bishop’s epistemology course who gave brutal (but very helpful) feedback on my writing. That was pretty much the extent of my interaction with the grad students, so I suspect we never met!

Tell me a little bit more about your time at Sheffield. Why’d you leave?

Well, mostly because it was only a one-year program and I had finished. I would have happily stayed, however. People are always surprised when I say this, but I love Sheffield. It was the first place I got to live that had reliable public transportation, so I felt connected to everything. It was also really the first place I lived that was a walkable city, and that I could go grocery shopping or get to the Peak district (to hike) without a car was amazing to me. I also really liked the people (who called me “duck”) and the food – yes, the food! Yorkshire pudding and Sunday roast. The cool social events the uni put on, like “silent discoes”. I even went to a roller derby match and I got to experience my first Christmas market and my first snowfall.

Tell me a little bit about your time with Teach for America.

I did Teach for America between graduating from Sheffield and beginning grad school at UT. Teaching high school was a major formative experience for me in a lot of ways. I remember feeling intense anxiety in my first week of teaching, because I realized that if I did a bad job, I could be ruining the lives and futures of a hundred kids. Also, it was hard! Trying to get a bunch of teenagers to trust you takes so much work, like months and months of relationship building. Truthfully, the kids didn’t really trust me until I came back the 2nd year. I think they were so used to people coming in-and-out, they just couldn’t afford to invest themselves in someone who might disappear.

I pretty much hated teaching that first year – it was hard and I was very bad at it. But experience is the best teacher, and when I came back the 2nd year, I knew what I was doing. I prioritized relationship-building over new content in the first few weeks of school and I felt more confident with the material I needed to teach. That year I came to love teaching and to love my kids. I’m still close with the students I taught when they were sophomores/juniors, and I even went back to Baton Rouge for their 10-year reunion last year.

What I learned from TFA is this: Many people are incompetent. Worse than incompetent, they are also often cruel. In my 2nd year, a big scandal broke out in the teaching community because it was discovered that some higher-ups in the school district had paid for degrees that they didn’t earn from a local university. At least one of the teachers at my school legitimately just did not teach – he played trashcan basketball with his students. I know this because my students would instead use that time to read The Great Gatsby (the assigned text for my English class) and he decided to ruin it for them by spoiling the ending. The next period a group of devastated kids trudges into my classroom begging me to tell them that Gatsby doesn’t die in the end. Asshole.

Before TFA, I thought most people were good, kind-hearted, and well-meaning. Maybe people disagreed about how best to pursue a certain end, sure, but I was confident we all wanted what was good, and we certainly all wanted what was best for our kids. My experience teaching disabused me of this notion.

On the upside, I met my best friend there, as well as my husband! Working with kids made me a kinder, more compassionate person. It taught me the value of thinking about the world from another person’s perspective. Truthfully, I suspect my standpoint epistemology origin story is in this experience.

Was UT what you expected?

No, it was not. Pretty immediately when I started grad school, I realized that I had been naïve and obtuse in my philosophy classes as an undergrad. In retrospect, there was obvious sexism and racism that I just didn’t notice at FSU, like the male undergrads interrupting and speaking over the only female philosophy professor (and professor of color, for that matter) I had (Maria Morales). I realized this when I started UT, because all the other women in my cohort mentioned that, before accepting the offer from UT, they had reached out to women grad students about their experience. That never

even occurred to me. The reports were apparently not good. I will not revisit those reports here – I believe they are well-known within the philosophy community.

Sexism was also very prevalent at UT. Sometimes the female grad students would be asked by male graduate students to make copies for them. We had a few male students that were considered “the golden boys” – it seemed to the rest of us that they received extra attention and resources. The department gave out a prize each year for the best paper by a graduate student (the Cogburn Prize) and usually a male student won. One year a woman graduate student, whose paper was published in a top-ranked specialist journal and won a prize in that journal (two supposed criteria), still was not selected.

The department technically did not have a bathroom for women students – our department, located in Waggener Hall takes up the 3rd and 4th floor. There is a men’s bathroom on the 3rd floor. A bathroom for women is on the 1st and 2nd floor, located in the classics department. Apparently, once upon a time the bathroom on floor three was gender neutral, but since the department was mostly men anyways, they just converted it to a men’s only restroom. The women staged a protest and hostile takeover of that bathroom. Rumor has it that a professor in the department emailed the chair, David Sosa, about his being “hen-pecked”. Needless to say, the bathroom was quickly returned to its men-only status.

I would say the biggest distinction between what I expected and what happened is this: I thought that as teachers, these professors, this department, would fully support their graduate students, mentor us, teach us how to do research and succeed in this profession. But that is not, to my mind, what they viewed their role to be. It seemed to me that they viewed their job as breaking us, thinning the herd. They literally gave us what was known around the department as a “scare talk” in our first semester, the basics of which were “a lot of you will drop out and most of you won’t get jobs”. They were just giving it to us straight, I guess.

But, as a result, the environment could be kind of cutthroat. I remember in my first or second year of grad school, there was a post that made the rounds identifying which Hogwarts house various philosophy departments would be. Ours was Slytherin.

What was the dissertation on?

My dissertation was on the relationship between knowledge and social identity and focused in particular on standpoint theory. A large part of the dissertation was really just me trying to work out for myself what that relationship was, how standpoint epistemology related to traditional epistemology, and what the value or insights of standpoint epistemology might be. The thing I’m proudest of in the dissertation is the chapter in which I argue that epistemic oppression is a consequence of some of the commitments within traditional epistemology, and that we can’t make sense of the occurrence of epistemic oppression without the resources that standpoint epistemology provides.

I think this interview series might provide some evidence for standpoint epistemology. How do you pitch standpoint epistemology to people skeptical of it?

I usually ask them if they have ever been to NYC, and if so, to reconstruct their route from one place to another (from home to the Cloisters, for example). Did they use the subway? If so, which lines? Did those lines have elevators? Usually, they can’t recall. Alternatively, I ask them to think about which buildings they access through campus, or to get to work. Do those buildings have ramps? Elevators? If so, are they easy to access or out of the way? These examples usually get people to see, rather quickly, that there are aspects of their environment they don’t think about or pay attention to at all, but that others must know about if they are to navigate effectively. They get quickly at the heart of the idea, central in standpoint theory, that there is an important relationship between embodiment, power, and knowledge.

What are you working on now? Any projects you’re especially excited about?

Yes! I’m writing a book about social and political resistance from an epistemic perspective, sort of bringing my work in standpoint epistemology to bear on questions in political philosophy. I suspect that many people can’t understand or appreciate what certain social and political acts or movements mean to accomplish, because they live in a world where the injustices these acts/movements mean to address are obscured. And I wonder what this means for the possibility of resistance to achieve its aims and how, thinking about this perspective, might empower us to rethink how we go about social and political reform.

If you could ask an omniscient being one question and be guaranteed a truthful answer, what would you ask?

What’s wrong with my dad?

This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.