051: Ep47 – Philosophy and Social Change

In this forty-seventh episode of the Philosophy Bakes Bread radio show and podcast, we interview Dr. Nancy McHugh on the topic of “Philosophy and Social Change.” After the “Know Thyself!” segment, we talk about her recent book, The Limits of Knowledge, inspired by her experiences in Vietnam witnessing continuing victims of Agent Orange. Then, in the next segment, we ask her about her experience teaching in prison in the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program.

Dr. McHugh is Professor and Chair of the philosophy department at Wittenberg University. Before publishing The Limits of Knowledge in 2015, Nancy released Feminist Philosophies A-Z in 2007. Her teaching in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program is coordinated with the London Correctional Institute in London, Ohio.

Listen for our “You Tell Me!” questions and for some jokes in one of our concluding segments, called “Philosophunnies.” Reach out to us on Facebook @PhilosophyBakesBread and on Twitter @PhilosophyBB; email us at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com; or call and record a voicemail that we play on the show, at 859.257.1849. Philosophy Bakes Bread is a production of the Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA). Check us out online at PhilosophyBakesBread.com and check out SOPHIA at PhilosophersInAmerica.com.

(1hr 6 mins)

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Notes

1. “Agent Orange,” via the History Channel Web site.
2. Nancy McHugh, The Limits of Knowledge (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015).
3. “Dasein,” referred to in this episode, is defined in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Heidegger, Martin,” as “the inherently social being who already operates with a pre-theoretical grasp of the a priori structures that make possible particular modes of Being.”
4. Council on International Educational Exchange.
5. Inside Out Prison Exchange Program.
6. Joe Margolis, philosopher at Temple University.

 

You Tell Me!

For our future “You Tell Me!” segments, Nancy posed the following question in this episode:

“What is it that you will not do? Have you reflected upon what line in the sand you will not cross?”

Let us know what you think! Via Twitter, Facebook, Email, or by commenting here below.

 

 

Transcript

Transcribed by Sarah S. of Rev.com, August 23, 2018.

For those interested, here’s how to cite this transcript or episode for academic or professional purposes (for pagination, see the printable, Adobe PDF version of this transcript):

Weber, Eric Thomas, Anthony Cashio, and Nancy McHugh, “Philosophy and Social Change,” Philosophy Bakes Bread, Episode 47, Transcribed by Sarah S. of Rev.com, WRFL Lexington 88.1 FM, Lexington, KY, October 2, 2017.

 

Radio announcer: This podcast is brought to you by WRFL Radio Free Lexington. Find us online at wrfl.fm, catch us on your FM radio while you’re in central Kentucky at 88.1 FM all the way to the left. Thank you for listening and please be sure to subscribe.

Weber: Hey everybody thanks for listening to WRFL Lexington 88.1 FM all the way to the left on your radio dial, this is Dr. Eric Weber here with you for another episode of Philosophy Bakes Bread.

Weber: Today’s episode is with Dr. Nancy McHugh and I’m gonna give you a little trigger warning, spoiler warning whatever you wanna call it, alright. There are some pretty powerful moments in what you’re about to hear if you continue listening to Philosophy Bakes Bread.

If you’re thinking about turning it off, you don’t know what you’re missing, it’s really wonderful stuff with a philosopher whom my cohost, Anthony and I didn’t really know in advance of just starting to learn a little bit about someone by chance and then asking her to come on the show, and we were blown away by what she had to tell us.

I hope you’ll feel the same way, and it’s really worth listening to. There are some difficult topics that are broached, but I hope that you stick with us and that you enjoy this episode. Episode 47 of Philosophy Bakes Bread, right here on WRFL Lexington 88.1 FM all the way to the left on your radio dial. Thanks everybody for listening.

Cashio: Hello and welcome to Philosophy Bakes Bread, food for thought about life and leadership.

Weber: Philosophy Bakes Bread is a productions of the society of philosophers in America AKA SOPHIA. I’m Dr. Eric Thomas Weber.

Cashio: And I’m Dr. Anthony Cashio, a famous phrase says that “Philosophy bakes no bread, that it’s not practical, but we and SOPHIA and on this show aim to correct that horrible misperception.

Weber: Philosophy Bakes Bread airs on WRFL Lexington 88.1 FM and is distributed as a podcast next. Listeners can find us online at philosophybakesbread.com and we hope you’ll reach out to us on Twitter @philosophybb, on Facebook @PhilosophyBakesBread, or by email at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com.

Cashio: Last but not least, you can always, always leave us a short recorded message with a question or a comment. Or we do like our bountiful praise, I know we talk about it. We don’t want just praise, we want bountiful and only bountiful.

Cashio: We may be able to play it on the show and you can reach us at (859) 257-1849, that’s (859) 257-1849.

Cashio: On today’s show, we’re very excited to be talking with Dr. Nancy McHugh, professor and chair of the philosophy department at Wittenberg University, and we’re gonna be talking about philosophy in social change. So thanks for joining us, Nancy.

Weber: Nancy is the author of Feminist Philosophies A to Z, which came out in 2007 as well as the 2015 book, The Limits of Knowledge: Generating Pragmatist Feminist Cases for Situated Knowledge.

Weber: She also teaches philosophy courses in the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program at London Correctional Institute in London, Ohio.

Cashio: Well Nancy, if you’ve listened to this show before, you know that we like to start with a segment called Know Thyself.

Cashio: So, we’re gonna ask you, tell us about yourself. Do you know thyself? Can you tell us about yourself? Where you grew up, maybe your background? How did your background shape you? How did you become Nancy?

McHugh: So, I’m from Fallston, Maryland, so just outside of north east of Baltimore. Both my parents were scientists. My dad was a biophysicist, and my mom was a biochemist.

McHugh: My mom was a biochemist turned fashion consultant. My father worked for the federal government at a military base called Edgewood Arsenal.

McHugh: The kind of questions that I think about, I think I’ve probably been thinking about for a really long time. So my father did a number of really interesting things in terms of his work. He was one of the people who helped develop the Kevlar vest. He helped develop the techniques that they used on burn victims.

McHugh: He was also one the ballistics experts that tested the gun that shot Kennedy.

Cashio: Whoa.

McHugh: But, his lab also developed biological weaponry. So it was part of his job working for the government. My family was also very Catholic, so I was raised in a pretty Catholic household. Went to a Catholic high school, Jesuit High School, which was a great education. But, I always said, there was this sort of disconnect between my father, who I thought was this person who was very much concerned with preserving life and my parents were both pro-life and then this other part of his job where he was developing weaponry, biological weaponry for the government.

McHugh: I remember at a really young age asking … conversations about how do you connect these two things, these two sets of beliefs and practices that you have. So you’re developing biological and chemical weaponry, which could kill masses of people, then you’re also this person who’s very moral and very upstanding and a very conscientious, caring, loving parent, but also very conscientious and loving person.

McHugh: He was the kind of person that would stop on the side of the road and help somebody if they had a flat tire.

McHugh: So I remember asking these questions and him saying to me, “Well my job is to save the lives of US citizens and to save the lives of US servicemen and that is why I do this.”

McHugh: I was never ultimately satisfied with that answer.

Cashio: I know, I was wondering-

McHugh: I think raising these questions and having those conversations at the dinner table really got me asking these hard questions about ethics and science and our obligations to each other, and our obligations to people who are far from us, and obligations to people who are near from us, and how we reconcile all of those.

McHugh: I think that really the stuff I think about I’ve probably been thinking about since I was nine or ten.

Weber: Wow, that’s pretty powerful. Did your parents welcome that kind of questioning? Or did they kind of say, who are you to be asking me questions? Like in the book of Job?

McHugh: Yeah, no my dad was really good. I mean I was always a really curious kid who’s always really good to be asking those kind of questions and he didn’t mind the hard questions like that, and he would try to answer them to the best of his ability. Because it is, he was in a complex role. I mean, that’s not an easy position to be in, in multiple ways.

McHugh: But he died when I was 15. So when I was a sophomore in high school. So the kinds of questions that I would’ve asked ended up being kind of unsatisfied. Like they were truncated when I was 15, so I imagine the conversations I would’ve had with him when I was 18 or the conversations I would have with him now. But I can’t help but think those conversations led me to a philosophical life. If that makes any kind of sense.

Cashio: Wow.

McHugh: That, and maybe even my dissatisfaction in not being able to finish asking those questions, led me to a philosophical life.

Cashio: Right, for a 10 year old, you get told an answer and if you’re not satisfied with it, it’s not clear why you’re not satisfied and you try to figure out why you’re not satisfied.

McHugh: Right, you’re still puzzled, right? Yeah.

Weber: That might be one of the most powerful answers I think we’ve gotten to this question, Anthony. I’m not kidding.

Cashio: Yeah, it was good.

Weber: Whoa, I’m kinda moved. My goodness. You sort of anticipated one of the questions we love to ask in the first segment. Anthony asked you to kinda tell us about yourself, so I get to ask the next one. Why and how philosophy? You kind of already began on that. So maybe tell us about the process of moving from this young person, frustrated and wishing to be able to ask more questions and so forth, tell us about how you got very specifically to philosophy. Because clearly, those are philosophical questions you’re asking. But did you know that at the time? And like how did you come to philosophy?

McHugh: So I was actually an international business major in college, with a concentration in economics. And I loved economics. I realized of course, in retrospect it’s like philosophy with numbers kind of. Same reason why I love stats. It’s like logic with numbers. But, I didn’t love … there are things I loved about my major, but I didn’t love it. And I actually dropped out of school when I was a junior in college.

McHugh: And my friends and I started a music magazine, which is still actually successful, it’s called Alternative Press. AP. You can buy it at Barnes and Noble.

Cashio: I know that one.

Weber: Wow.

McHugh: Yeah, so I was living in Cleveland at the time.

Weber: You’re kidding.

McHugh: My friends, no they were going to Kent State, they dropped out. I dropped out of college. And we started this. I was their advertising manager. And so I had accounts with like Sub Pup Records and TDK Tapes and all this kind of stuff. So I had all these accounts, I’d go see bands like five, six nights a week. But I was sort of ultimate … I mean, I loved that, but it was not what I wanted.

McHugh: I was living in Cleveland, there was a great used book store there called Max Backs. And I walked in one day and I was looking at these books, and I picked up Nicomachean Ethics and I started reading that. And it was the first thing that I read that was really, really hard and intrigued me. And I knew that it was gonna take me a long time to figure it out.

McHugh: So I went back to school and back to my undergraduate year of college and I started taking philosophy courses. And my first philosophy course was a two credit, hour course in existentialism with a professor named Jim Liota who has died of multiple sclerosis. And he was in the final stages of it, he was in a wheelchair, had a catheter bag, was blind, and I was studying existentialism. I was reading Paul Tillich’s, The Courage to Be, with a man who died a year and a half later. Who was dying.

Cashio: Geeze, that’s a very powerful experience.

McHugh: And I always thought to myself how remarkable it was that he was brave enough to wheel himself into a classroom with 18 to 22 year olds and do philosophy. And it was this like this really moment of the expem … like what an example of the courage that philosophy gives. And that was really a life affirming for him in his moments of death.

Weber: I’m getting misty eyed over here. My goodness. I’m not kidding. Wow. I do want to make one quick point for our listeners. Aristotle had a son named Nicomachus. And so we use a big word when we refer to Aristotle’s ethics because it’s a really famous one. It’s called the Nicomachean Ethics, because it’s for his son, Nicomachus. And it’s the really great book that Aristotle wrote.

Cashio: His father too. His father was Nicomachus too, right?

Weber: I did not know that.

McHugh: Hmm. Yeah that’s interesting.

Weber: I just learned something today. I’ve learned several things today. Wow. I’m kinda moved. I’m kinda moved.

Cashio: Well, you had a pretty powerful experience and it sounds it went from starting a magazine to you fell into Aristotle. People do that. They just fall right in and you don’t come back out.

Cashio: So you fell in.

McHugh: It’s like the godfather. I keep trying to get out and they keep pulling me back in.

Cashio: Right, well I guess that’s another question. What is it that keeps pulling you back in? What is philosophy to you? We always ask this of our guests because it’s nice to hear all the beautiful answers we get.

McHugh: No I think it’s a great question. Because I think that there’s a lot to that question. And I think it’s a really important one. So first of all, I think philosophy is a set of tools that we use to investigate the world and ourselves as beings within the world. I don’t view us as separate from the world, I’m very much a pragmatist in that sense, where I think that we are beings immersed within a world and sort of co-producing ourselves and the world at the same time.

McHugh: I also think philosophy is sort of a set of ideas, or a history of ideas. And that part of our job is to contest the cannon and what falls within and what falls out of this history of ideas. But I think it is like a body of knowledge and a body of ideas that has some cohesion. And that cohesion might be sort of a self imposed cohesion, but there’s a cohesion.

McHugh: And then I also think philosophy is a community of people who exist within the academy, but also outside of the academy. I know a lot of really good … people talk about prison lawyers, I know a lot of really excellent prison philosophers who are just really reflective people. And I’ve met people at conferences who are not PhD’s in philosophy, but are as intensely philosophical and maybe more committed to our discipline than some of us are sometimes. And so I think it’s really the idea of –

McHugh: So philosophy for my is a really big community of people who engage in using this set of tools as opposed to just people who are formally within the discipline.

Weber: What did you mean when you used the phrase, “prison lawyers?” You mean people who study law while in prison?

McHugh: Yeah, so there’s a group of people who people sort of refer to prison lawyers. They go in, they read all the legal books, they know how, they advise people in their cases, they really function as prison lawyers. They help write up documents and everything else.

Weber: These are inmates? And not people who go to prison to help.

McHugh: No, people who are in prison. So people who are incarcerated, basically serving the role of lawyer without actually having an official degree. Just having the knowledge.

Weber: Because they’re self taught?

McHugh: And so I’ve had guys in class who … we had a class yesterday, we were reading Hannah Arendt’s, Eichmann in Jerusalem. And so I mentioned Heidegger of course and one of the guys who is sitting next to me, Nate, jumped right in and explained who Heidegger was and talked about dasein and everything else. And they, many of them read voraciously and broadly. So there’s a lot of really good prison philosophers.

Weber: We tend to ask at the end whether you’d recommend a certain text, but you kinda just mentioned a great one by Hannah Arendt. And so I’m gonna go another direction and ask you about the metaphor you raised at first when you talked about philosophy as a set of tools. I mean, just this morning I used a hammer and a nail, and frankly I didn’t do a very good job, but that’s another issue.

Cashio: Just because you have the tool, doesn’t mean you can use it right.

McHugh: That’s right. Exactly, exactly.

Weber: The thing I was trying to hang didn’t hang very well. But my point is, how do you use philosophy as a tool? Like what’s a philosophical tool and how do I … I know how I could’ve, I have ideas of how to hammer better and to get my thing on the wall the way I want to better, how do I use philosophical tools? And to do what?

McHugh: Okay, so I’ll use this as an example for my conversation we were having in class, is we were talking about the Eichmann in Jerusalem piece that Arendt did. And one of the claims that Arendt makes is that there’s nothing particularly remarkable about Eichmann. In fact, he’s incredibly unremarkable and one of the ways in which he’s incredibly unremarkable is he wasn’t a particularly reflective thinker. And he was probably trained to not be reflective, he was not a critical thinker. And so the conversation we had is well how do you get people to … I said, “Look, at some point we all have to ask ourselves the question, what is it that I will not do?” And so we all need to ask ourselves that question, yet we’re not trained to do that.

McHugh: And so then we had this conversation about how do you get people, if the Milgram studies that were done about using your shocking, the famous Yale experiments where they shocked people, pretended like they were shocking everyone else. Internationally 60 to 70% of people will keep shocking people when someone in a position of authority tells them to. So how do you get people to sort of respond to authority appropriately and say, “No, this is something I will not do.” Or as EE Cummings says in his poem, Olaf, “There is some shit that I will not eat.”

McHugh: Like what do we decide is our line that we’re not gonna cross? Well I think philosophy helps us to start asking that question. And it’s a question we should be training people to ask much younger. So these people, they teach philosophy in high school and middle school, that’s really where this question of how to be a critical thinker, and how to sort of be someone who’s self-reflective. So for me, philosophy is a sharp tool that allows us to ask really hard, critical questions of ourselves and of others. And to be kind of empowered to do that.

Weber: You heard it, folks. That’s a wonderful answer to the question of how to use the philosophical tools.

Cashio: We always do the, “You tell me,” at the end. But I think that’s a good one to start with. What is it I will not do?

Weber: Yeah, we’ll come back to that, and Nancy may have another question she wants to ask, but we can bring that up again.

Weber: Thanks everybody for listening to this first segment of Philosophy Bakes Bread with Dr. Nancy McHugh. I’m Eric Weber, my cohost is Anthony Cashio, and we’ll be back after a short break.

Cashio: Welcome back to Philosophy Bakes Bread. This is Anthony Cashio and Eric Weber, here talking to day with Nancy McHugh. And we’re talking about philosophy and social change.

Cashio: In this segment, we’re going to ask Nancy about her recent book, The Limits of Knowledge. A book about feminism, the power of context when it comes to what we know. Then in the next segment, we’ll ask more specifically about the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program and how she sees her book and that program is contributing to social change.

Cashio: So Nancy, an easy one right off the bat, can you tell us about your book and how you came to write it?

McHugh: Yeah, I’ll start off with how I came to write it. So in 2004, I went to Vietnam with a group of academics. It was one of the, I think it was CIEE, or one of the academic tours. And I went to Vietnam and I was gonna study the effects of Doi Moi, which is the transition from a communistic socialist economy to a market economy in Vietnam. And the effects it was gonna have on women and children. And I went really kind of out of curiosity for the most part and an interest to learn everything else. I didn’t have a project in mind per se.

McHugh: And so I went there and after being, we were in Vietnam for three weeks, maybe a week or two in … actually it was probably about two weeks in, we had gone down to Ho Chi Minh City and when we were there, we were asked to visit a peace village. And a peace village is a hospital or space that houses victims of Agent Orange. So in Vietnam right now, there are still people who are suffering the effects of not the Agent Orange spraying, but there were barrels and containers left of Agent Orange and there were other agents like Agent White and whatever else that were all sort of left there after the Vietnam War.

McHugh: And so, I walk into the hospital and we’re met by a young man who was a formerly conjoined twin, and he had been separated from his brother a couple years earlier and he was walking with crutches, because he only had one leg and he spoke perfect English. And of course, we were so American, none of us spoke Vietnamese. Or occurred to us to learn it before we went there. And so he’s escorting us through this peace village and we go up to the second floor. And I walk into a room and there’s all these child victims of Agent Orange.

McHugh: And there’s a woman, she comes walking out and she’s holding this young girl who’s eyes were fused shut, her mouth and palette were fused. She had hydroencephilitis, so her head was very large and this woman’s name was Trinh Kukurus and her husband was filing the first class action lawsuit for the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange, against the chemical companies that had produced it.

McHugh: So here I’m seeing all these children in these beds, their bodies it was like a war zone, but 30 years after the war. And so then we start talking later on to the director of the hospital. And she’s telling me, she’s talking with me about Agent Orange and the mutagenic effects its having and that’s how all of these children are being born with severe birth abnormalities. There’s a whole bunch of molar pregnancies, which are false pregnancies that women are having. And she starts showing us slides of genetic damage.

McHugh: And this takes us back to the earlier part of our conversation, when I was a kid I remember my parents talking about Agent Orange testing on the military base where they worked. And I remember conversations about the US Vietnam vets with the class action lawsuit against the US government. And hearing it’s not supposed to cause all these mutagenic effects. So I start asking all these questions like how can this happen? And she’s showing me all this evidence.

McHugh: So I come back and I realize when I was in Vietnam, I was in a position to see something that I would never have been able to see if I was not sort of situated within that environment. And so I came back and started doing some research and I wrote a grant to the National Science Foundation and got funded for this book project.

Weber: Which is really hard to do by they way.

McHugh: Yeah, it is. It’s hard for philosophers to get them, right? And so it was great. It paid for my first sabbatical and so the book started off, really initially with this sort of thinking about this Agent Orange case. But then it included cases, a women’s community and Bay View Hunters Point San Francisco called the Mother’s Committee of Bay View Hunters Point. It’s a community action group. I look at endometriosis and community action, and the research on endometriosis. I mention Mennonite children with genetic abnormalities and how we go about figuring out what kind of investigative techniques actually help us understand those better.

McHugh: But it really all started with the trip to Vietnam.

Weber: Wow. You’re determined to get me crying here. In order to keep my sanity for a second, I want to point out something, which you mentioned as an acronym, because we try to do that for any technical terms on the show. And at one point, Nancy mentioned the CIEE and for people unaware, that’s the Council on International Educational Exchange. And sometimes they fund or support, however … I don’t know exactly what they do, but I’m pretty sure they fund or help support people, scholars to travel for various sorts of things. And this sounds like a pretty eye opening experience. My goodness. Wow.

Cashio: Well, I will say this, every time we ask you a question, you’ve got an amazing answer.

Weber: A humdinger.

Cashio: Yeah.

Weber: Technical term, you’ve had a humdinger for us. I need to take a deep breath before I ask you something else.

Weber: In your book, Nancy, and this is drawing from some language that I found about your book. Sorry, I hope I’m not simply interpreting you or especially not wrong, that you argue for taking a situated approach to science and medicine in order to meet the needs of marginalized groups. That’s what I read about your book anyway. And so I want to break that down. And so, basically the big picture question is, what kinds of approaches are we presently taking to science and medicine now? And what does it mean to take a situated approach instead?

Cashio: Right.

McHugh: Yeah. So for example, I’ll use toxic risk assessment as an example. So we want to test for something like the compounds that are in Agent Orange. Most of our testing for that, it doesn’t happen in Vietnam, it doesn’t happen where Agent Orange is actually a living community. It happens in a laboratory, and it might happen through the chemical analysis, or it might happen through animal studies. But for example, we do toxic risk assessment and that looks at each individual chemical and the effects that it might have. And at what level do we start to see it being toxic or mutagenic?

Weber: And what does mutagenic mean?

McHugh: Changing at the genetic level. So at the level of the sperm or the egg, for example, so for a sort of long term genetic change, or in adults for example, mutagenic as in causing cancer.

Weber: Or for kids, birth defects right?

McHugh: Right, exactly. And that would be the ones that are happening at the genetic level, usually. Not always.

McHugh: So, those kind of tests are really isolated into a laboratory, but they don’t show us what happens … so in the case of Vietnam where people are immersed within and environment in which the dioxin, which is a compound in Agent Orange that is mutagenic, is in the dust of their floors, it’s in the water, it’s in like the fat of the duck and the frogs and the fish that they’re eating. And you’ve got people that are living in an environment in which they’re living in poverty.

McHugh: And so for example, fat is like a really critical caloric source. Like we don’t really need … Americans, we don’t need the fat of the meat, because we’ve got plenty of other sources of calories and nutrients, but when you’re living of the mountains of Vietnam and your resources are slim, fatty foods are actually really important source of calories.

McHugh: So for example, in some areas of Vietnam, women have 47 times the amount of dioxin considered safe in their breast milk.

Cashio: 47?

McHugh: 47 times the amount that the World Health Organization has considered to be safe. So 47 times the amount of dioxin that’s considered to be safe is in their breast milk. And that offloads, what’s happening is that it’s been stored in their body fat, and it’s offloading through the breast milk into their infants. And then that’s not including the ways in which-

Weber: You’re gonna make me cry, Nancy.

McHugh: That’s not including the ways in which a child is developing in a woman’s womb, right? And they’ve already perhaps … so the sperm and the egg might already be compromised to begin with. They now realize that the seminal fluid may also be carrying dioxin, which makes the womb an immediately, if you want to call it, hostile environment right away.

McHugh: But we didn’t have the ways in which we approached dioxin couldn’t answer, couldn’t give us that kind of knowledge. So what ended up happening is, a bunch of different researchers went into Vietnam … oh, and also I should say, we’ve always dismissed the Vietnamese research on Agent Orange and dioxin. And in fact, in my book I talk about a telegraph from a US diplomat over there to the State Department here describing the Vietnamese as engaging in their propaganda war against the United States with their arguments about child victims of Agent Orange.

McHugh: And so we dismissed Vietnamese research. It’s not including our met analyses of Agent Orange normally. So what happened is some Canadian researchers went in, they started working directly with Vietnamese people and Vietnamese researchers, they stayed in Vietnam, they go back repeatedly still. And an environmentalists name, an environmental scientist named Dewern Chuck did that. I think he’s actually a chemist. And then I forget the other person’s name. So then a researcher from the US, actually has gone in and he’s done all these blood level tests of dioxin.

McHugh: And when you put all these pieces together, you can correlate them. You can’t get a direct cause and effect relationship, but you get a really significant correlation that in areas of high levels of dioxin, we have high levels of miscarriages, high levels of molar pregnancies, high levels of children born with birth abnormalities, high levels of adults with cancer. And in areas where you don’t have high levels of dioxin, you don’t have those.

Cashio: So the researchers going in, that’s kind of the example of what you mean by the situated?

McHugh: That’s one way of looking at situated.

Cashio: Like going into the situated part of it.

McHugh: One way is actually being within a community. So another example I use is … part of it’s being within the community and learning to ask these questions about multiple pathways of disease with how much longevity plays into it. What happens when we’re looking at 30 years of exposure within a culture. It’s asking questions about lifestyle. It’s asking questions about things like poverty. So how does a body being compromised react differently to a toxin in a body that’s continually getting good nourishment and everything else?

McHugh: But it’s also asking questions about how people are given information. Right, so if women are illiterate or are in situations in which they are not able to get the kind of information they have to keep themselves healthy. And if the men aren’t either, then how … it’s about what kind of options and social processes go along. So for me, it’s a more, I don’t want to say holistic approach, but it’s a much more integrated approach than we tend to take.

Cashio: I like it.

Weber: Well let me tell you, as a father who was just this morning looking at my three year old thinking how big he’s getting and everything. And just thinking about breast milk being 47 times worse than … makes any sense.

McHugh: No it’s crazy, because you think that that is like the healthiest thing.

Weber: It’s devastating.

McHugh: A family can give their children, is breast milk. Like that’s the baseline for good health. And to think that we’ve created an environment in which that breast milk is toxic, it’s horrible.

Weber: Yes.

Cashio: Wow.

Weber: So we have other questions.

Cashio: So in your book you do talk mostly about medicine and this is just a powerful, powerful example. Do you see this sort of situated approach or this integrated approach, can we apply it to other sort of contexts?

McHugh: Yeah, I think so. And it’s really built off of kind of stuff that Sandra Harding was doing with standpoint epistemology and people like Donna Haraway the historian of science was doing with situated knowledge, and the kind of work that Lorraine Code has done with epistemic responsibility, which is the way in which we gain responsible, the practices we engage in for responsible, ethical knowing. And her work especially in ecological thinking about the importance of place and location and not just in a metaphorical sense, but for me in a very material sense, which is how she engages is also.

McHugh: And so for me, it’s putting together a lot of different pieces, and then a pragmatist at heart, which is understanding ourselves as beings that are immersed in a transaction with the world, as opposed to beings that are acting upon or outside, or separate from the world.

Weber: Well I think that what you’re talking about sounds like it’s got an awful lot of areas of possible application. And at the same time, you’ve got an awful lot of punch in what you’re focusing on as it is. So thank you for talking to us about this. Some very difficult subjects. Everybody, we’re gonna come back after a short break to talk further with Nancy McHugh and I am Eric Weber, and my cohost is Anthony Cashio. You’re listening to Philosophy Bakes Bread. We’ll be right back.

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Cashio: Welcome back everyone to Philosophy Bakes Bread. This is Anthony Cashio and Eric Weber, and it is our privilege today to be talking with Nancy McHugh. We’ve been talking about her recent book, The Limits of Knowledge. About situated research and awareness and some important topics in the last segment. And this segment, we’re gonna switch it up slightly. We’re gonna as Nancy about the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program. Maybe we’ll just jump right to it, Nancy could you just explain to us and out listeners what this Inside Out program is? And what inspired you to begin it?

McHugh: Yeah, so I’ll talk about what got me into it in the first place. So I got my PhD at Temple University. And the program started there in 1997. And I had a visiting faculty position there after I finished my PhD there. And so, I was in a quad of offices and there was a woman named Lori Pompa who was a criminologist. She was in a visiting line also and the criminology department was in another building, but sometimes visiting lines, you’re sort of put in odd places.

McHugh: So, we had some space in philosophy, so she actually was in the office near to me. So one day I walked over to her office and I said, “Hey Lori, what’s up?” And she said, “I just did this great thing where I took a whole bunch of Temple University students to Graderford Prison, and we had class with a bunch of men serving life sentences. And one of the guys, Paul said, ‘you should do this for a whole semester.’ And she said, ‘Well I am.'” And I was like, “Oh well that’s cool.”

McHugh: And so I finished at Temple and I came to Wittenberg and I got involved in community engagement stuff right away. I was working with a girl’s program for at risk girls between the two high schools in their area. And it was done in cooperation with Annie Ott College and the community college and we were doing technology skills and life skills. And we did that for several years. And then Annie Ott shut down, there was some transitions in the colleges, so we stopped doing that somewhere mid 2000s or so.

McHugh: And so I wanted something else to do, because I really do think it’s important for philosophers to be out there as … I think it’s important for us to be public philosophers. To be out of our offices.

Cashio: Here, here.

McHugh: And so I kinda thought to myself, “Well juvenile detention center might be a cool place to get going.” And so I was like, “Hmm, I wonder what Lori Pompa is doing with this Inside Out Prison Exchange?” And so I do a search and she turned it into an international program.

Weber: Wow.

McHugh: So it went from one year set, she and a man serving a life sentence conceived of, to being taught all over the United States, in Ireland, in Australia, in Canada, everything else. And so I went and I got trained in Detroit. The training is 60 hours. 35 of it was in Rhine Correctional, a men’s prison. And I was trained by 17 men who are incarcerated, and they were my trainers.

McHugh: So that’s kinda how I got into it and I taught at the juvenile detention center doing Inside Out courses for two years and that was great. But it’s a short stay facility, so it’s hard because the kids were only in class with us sometimes for two weeks or three weeks. And so that model wasn’t great. And so then I contacted London Correctional, which is a men’s level two prison, about 20 minutes from here and I started teaching there in 2013, and I’ve been there since. And then I go to the detention center and do workshops now instead, with students.

Cashio: Wow, so you were trained by inmates, is that what you’re saying? At least in part?

McHugh: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. So Lori Pompa and Laura Lempert were sort of the training facilitators, but our trainers were actually these 17 men who were incarcerated. Some of them were juvenile lifers, which means they’ve been incarcerated and tried as adults since they were juveniles. So one of the guys, Maurice, was 13 years old when he was incarcerated and tried as an adult. Another guy, 16. And had been sentenced to life as juveniles.

Weber: Tried as an adult at the age of 13?

McHugh: Oh, we try 11 year olds as adults.

Weber: Whoa.

Cashio: I’ve got a son about that age, I could just imagine him being tried as an adult. No way he can make anything that’s like an adult decision.

McHugh: No, and there’s so many problems with it. And just the assumption that we’ve made a legal decision to distinguish between an adult at 18 and a juvenile at 17, yet routinely try juveniles as adults. It’s I think unconscionable.

Cashio: So you take students to the prison? To London Correctional?

McHugh: Right, so what I do is I take … so an Inside Out course consists of traditional, it’s usually 15 traditional college students and 15 people who are incarcerated. And so, for example this semester I’m teaching a course called Philosophy Incarcerated. And I’ve got 15 students from Wittenberg’s campus going to have class with 15 men who are incarcerated. All the students in my class, so the inside students are the incarcerated students. So Wittenberg is unique and I’m very proud of this, is that we give credit to our inside students.

McHugh: Some schools will not do that, but Wittenberg donates the college credit to the men in our class. And they transfer that to a degree they might be doing. There’s actually a college program in there. So they transfer that credit to the college program.

Cashio: Wow, so the traditional students and we call them the inside students, they basically are taking a philosophy class together? Is that my-

McHugh: Together. We sit every other seat. So, it’s inside student, outside student, inside student, outside student, in a really big circle basically.

Cashio: Inside out, they’ve taken that name very seriously.

McHugh: Yeah, exactly. Exactly, and you know the level of conversation and engagement, it’s unbelievable. And I don’t know whether it’s heightened because of the location, or whether it’s heightened because the inside students are so dedicated that it forces the outside students to be as equally dedicated. Or it’s that we’re all hyper aware because the perception initially is that we’re all coming from these different situations. I’m not sure what the difference is, but there’s something. I noticed it and the students notice it, it’s different.

Cashio: Wow.

Weber: So like LMA and B and D.

McHugh: Yeah.

Cashio: What are the outside students, what is their general response to this? You’ve been doing it several semesters.

McHugh: It’s really good. I mean it’s a popular course. So I’ve taught … in terms of the courses I’ve taught there. I taught a freshman seminar called The Art of Living Ethically there. I’ve taught Many Faces of Justice. Global Health Justice. A course in embodiment and habit. And now Philosophy Incarcerated. And now there’s usually a waiting list for the course.

McHugh: So it was filled up at 15 and I couldn’t take any more. And so, students talk about it. They’re pretty … and the ones that take it are really invested. I’ve heard some of the outside students say that it changes everything for them. And then the inside students, it’s really interesting because I’ve had one guy in my class, James, who is on his fifth course with me and he did one reading group, and then we did a writing group where we had an article called An Epistemology of Incarceration published in the feminist philosophy journal, Philosophia. That was co-written with 10 people who are incarcerated and myself and three outside students.

Weber: Nancy, what’s epistemology?

McHugh: Well, epistemology is I guess the technical definition would be theories of knowledge or studies of the theories of knowledge. I think epistemology is also sort of a … if practice is the right word, but it’s a way of thinking and engaging the world in such a way that we make inquiries about knowledge and knowledge practice. And one can have sort of an epistemological orientation, which might be sort of one’s unique orientation which they’re looking from and have been shaped by their past experiences. By their physical location, by their political location.

Weber: So for instance, if you’re looking at a given study, and you’re thinking about the ethical dimensions. You might be concerned about whether or not patients who are being studied gave consent for what’s happening and so forth. And if you’re looking at epistemologically you might be looking at how are the researchers trying to determine this or that about something, right?

McHugh: How did they know?

Weber: How did they know?

McHugh: How do they generate knowledge and how do they know that what they’re getting for example is accurate information? So it would be those sorts of things. And are there other intellectual methods or scientific methods that would yield better knowledge?

Weber: So thank you for that.

Cashio: And in incarceration then, how would epistemology be different? Maybe give us a sort of spoiler of your paper.

McHugh: So in the article, we argue that some people who are incarcerated can develop what we call sort of a resistant epistemology, an epistemology of incarceration in which they are able to sort of see and act more clearly within the structure of prison. So it’s a little bit like a DuBoisian double consciousness but maybe even more heightened than that.

Weber: I’m gonna have to ask you about that you know.

McHugh: And you sort of develop these sort of resistant strategies in which to develop to survive prison well. I mean, there’s a phrase that they use in prison called doing a bit, and that’s like doing your time. And some people do their bits really well, and some people do not do their bits really well. And there’s some honor in learning how to do one’s bit well. And so, when I talk about these sort of prison philosophers that I have, there are guys that have really thought in a very self-conscious and intentional level about what it means for them to value themselves as knowers and as individuals within a system that intentionally tries to make them into sort of the Foucaultian sense of docile bodies, to shut down critical thinking. To shut down any kind of individuality, any kind of … they wear uniforms, they all have numbers on them. They’re always called by their last names, not their first names.

McHugh: How do you resist that? And they argue that they develop … some of them develop sort of a critical consciousness.

Weber: So hold on. So the first part of what you explained had to do with some form of resistance that had to do with knowledge. Hence epistemology, right? And so who is resisting what about what knowledge?

McHugh: So it’s not that they’re resisting anything in particular about knowledge, they’re resisting sort of the numbing sensations of the prison system that is trying to shut them down, they would say, intellectually, emotionally, and develop strategies in which to live within this system in ways that allows them to be critical epistemic agents. When many of them would argue the goal of the system is to prevent them from being critical epistemic agents.

Weber: So they want to retain their abilities as critical thinkers? And that’s the kind of resistance?

McHugh: Yeah. And some of them would say develop it. I think most people who are incarcerated come out of the same school systems that all of us come out of that don’t necessarily have … education does not focus on critical thinking all that much. And then you think about going into a system where, in fact, you’re encouraged in multiple levels to not thing critically. In prison, education is frequently viewed with suspicion by not only the people who are incarcerated, why would you want to do that? But also sometimes by the guards. Like why do you want to do that? Suspicion. So to make the choice to educate oneself and to sort of think against the grain is a unique challenge. It’s hard enough on the outside, but it’s even harder on the inside.

Weber: I bet.

Cashio: You know, you said something kind of actually I was curious about. So even in the incarcerated population, where they’re sort of, “Why would you do that?” So who are the students? The inside students. How do they end up in your program? Do they self select?

McHugh: Little bit of both.

Cashio: Do they choose to take the course? Little bit of both?

McHugh: So there are some self-selection, right? So people have to make an intentional choice to get an education in prison. And so that’s something they have to choose to do. It’s not the most obvious thing to do. And it maybe in some ways, on the one hand if you think about the long haul, it’s the common sense thing to do. But if you think about the short haul, quite frankly you’re probably safer … there’s a logic for example, to being affiliated with a gang. It gives you some safety. It gives you community.

McHugh: To choose the path of education means you’re having to forego those sorts of things that might make you safer in the general prison population in order to have this long-term goal of maybe when you get out, to live a life you want to live. But also, for some of them, some of the guys in my class are people who are not getting out. And they want to live a meaningful life under the conditions of incarceration to the greatest extent they can. And for them, it’s reading avidly, it is engaging in ideas.

McHugh: When I was in Germany, teaching in Germany, my students ended up running a philosophy of science reading group so that when I got back to teach, we’d have students primed to go into my Global Health Justice class. So they’re making an intentional choice that many of us on the outside don’t even choose to make. And they’re doing it under oppressive conditions.

Cashio: Wow.

Weber: Wow, I think you’re illustrating beautifully why these two segments go together, because your book and what you’ve been doing in the Inside Out Prison Exchange program really do contribute to understanding the ways in which philosophy conserve our purposes and aims in terms of social change.

Weber: Well everybody, thank you so much for listening to Philosophy Bakes Bread. We’re gonna come back with one final segment with Nancy McHugh. This is Eric Weber and my cohost is Anthony Cashio. Thanks for listening, we’ll be right back.

Cashio: Welcome back to Philosophy Bakes Bread. This is Anthony Cashio and Eric Weber, and today we are talking with Nancy McHugh. We’ve been talking about philosophy for social change. We’ve talked about her book in the second segment and her work in prisons, the Inside Out program, which is really fantastic in the last segment. And so this final segment, we’ll wrap up with a final big picture question or two, some light hearted jokes, and a question for us all to ponder. Hopefully you’re pondering it. I think you should.

Cashio: How long have you been doing the Inside Out program? Remind me again.

McHugh: Since 2011. So seven years of teaching that.

Cashio: Seven years of teaching it.

Weber: Wow.

Cashio: So how, in your own personal work, and in your philosophical thinking, how’s working with prison sort of influenced your philosophical thinking and your work? And how you go about thinking about what philosophy is? Has it changed it at all? Or is it?

McHugh: Yeah, no doubt. I mean, so in a very practical way, I think most of us, most philosophers think we know what justice is because we talk about it all the time and we read about it. But, you don’t really know what justice or injustice is until you are spending a lot of time with people who are living within the justice system, if you want to call it that.

McHugh: And so it really gave me … it becomes really hard to think that a book or article is as important sometimes. It’s not that I don’t value that part of our process, because I do. It’s how what we get what we do out there. But, it’s really hard when you’ve got sort of … when you’re engaging people who are serving life sentences in prison, or whose lives are literally confined. It becomes really hard to think that the most important thing that I might do is write an article.

McHugh: And so I think that, it’s not just that the teaching is important, because I’m not the center of what’s happening there. It’s the students that are the center of what’s happening there and they’re the ones that are really sort of making the magic. And the fact that what happens is I have some guys who are getting released and they’re going out and they are sort of taking these ideas and engaging these ideas on the outside. And I have students who might be going into criminology. Or philosophers, or people going to law school who now have had this experience.

McHugh: And they’re gonna be the ones that are making decisions about incarceration 15, 20 years down the road, right? And when you think about the ways in which that reshapes them, and they start to see humanity in a really powerful way within people who are taught to not see humanity in, that’s important.

Weber: No doubt. No doubt. Well Nancy, one of the questions that Anthony and I both wanted to ask you about is something that our listeners won’t have seen coming because when we reached out to you to plan for this conversation, you had mentioned something about a philosophy brew, and it had to do with you going and drinking beer with people at breweries and talking philosophy. We need to hear about that, because it sounds fantastic.

Weber: Can you tell us what that is and what’s going on?

McHugh: Yeah, well here’s the lead up, is Marks did a lot of his best writing in a Belgian coffee house. A Belgian brewery. He lived over top of a brewery. So it’s within our tradition.

Weber: Karl and not Groucho Marks, right?

McHugh: Exactly, exactly. So that the author of the communist manifesto. So we really wanted, our department was really … all of what my whole department, we do public philosophy. So there’s another person who teaches in prison.

Weber: That is awesome.

McHugh: My colleague Julius Bailey goes and gives speeches all over the country. We all are engaged, we’re a really unusual department in that we’re all engaged in public philosophy. And so we really wanted to do soemthign that helped us get people.

Weber: Congratulations by the way, because that’s awesome.

McHugh: Thank you. We were intentional about that when we shaped ourselves. And hired. And so we decided we sort of wanted to reach out to the community and that we had things we wanted to talk about and we knew other people did too. And so some Wittenberg alums had opened a brewery a year or so ago and it’s a German style brewery. It’s called Mother Stewart’s. And she was a prohibitionist. So it’s a great name. And so I sort of inquired. Are people interested in doing this? And I got a great response.

McHugh: So I sent around an email saying, “Hey, thirsty for knowledge? Come meet us at Mother Stewart’s.” And so tonight our theme is free will. And hopefully … our students are invited, faculty, community members, and so, I don’t know what kind of showing we’ll get this first time. But I’m hoping we’ve got three sessions planned for the fall. And hopefully we’ll do three or four. The goal is to do once a month during the spring. And we’re hoping that’s a way in which we can not really do … I mean I guess it’s philosophy outreach, but it’s kind of like philosophy in reach. Like we want us to all come together and share these ideas.

Cashio: Community building.

Weber: Man, that’s awesome. Philosophy in reach. I love it.

Cashio: Philosophy in reach.

Weber: That is really … I want to come. That sounds so cool.

McHugh: Well you can come. You can come be a guest in our … we’ve got two more dates and lots in the spring and you’re only two hours away.

Weber: I would love to. I’m not gonna hold you to that invitation, but we will talk again. That sounds awesome to me.

Weber: Well there was one more thing that I wanted to make sure we asked before we go, to sort of conclude with the big things we tend to conclude with on this show, which has to do with the fact that you mentioned something about work you’ve done with a juvenile detention center that has to do with the Philosophy Bakes Bread podcast. So forgive us for being a little vain and wanting to hear about this. But I want to hear about that.

McHugh: Self promotion is important. Philosophers, we’re not very good at doing it. So I have two sections of a class called the Art of Living Ethically. And one week my 1:00 session goes down to the juvenile detention center and the next week my 2:20 session goes down. And basically if I’m taking one group down, I can’t be back in time, or I have to leave too early to have class with the other one. The shuffle is just kinda too crazy. But I wanted to make sure that the class that wasn’t going had philosophical work to do.

McHugh: And so some of them from that group will be planning the workshop that they’re gonna lead, but about 15 students will need some work to do. And so, I though, “Hey these Philosophy Bakes Bread podcasts, they’re an hour and three minutes long, which is just like my class in an hour and five minutes.” So the students will listen to a podcast for each week that they are not going to the juvenile detention center and they have to write a critical response to the podcast. So there’s writing involved and reflection involved with the podcast.

McHugh: And they get to choose whichever podcast they want to, so it’s up to them.

Weber: Tell them also that there’s two ways for them to win some swag by the way. And the deadline is coming up.

McHugh: They like that idea.

Weber: You get a t-shirt, a hat, a coffee mug, a mousepad or anything. And anyone who enters gets a sticker at least. And if they just answer their favorite episodes, you tell me question, that’s one way to enter. If they’re on iTunes, we would love some iTunes reviews. That’s another way to enter. Actually they can enter in two ways, therefore. And so let them know, because we want a few more. There’s not much time left. We want a few more entries. In fact, by the time this episode airs, we may just be … I don’t know if the deadline will have passed, but I hope not.

McHugh: Well I’ll tell them in class. I will see them on Monday.

Weber: Awesome. That is so incredibly cool and honestly I feel totally honored.

McHugh: I was excited. When I thought of that, this was brilliance. So it works out great.

Weber: Yeah. That’s so cool. Thank you so much for doing that and for letting us know about it.

Cashio: I think we already have an answer to it, but I don’t want to … we always ask this question. Our final question, one of our final questions, it comes from the inspiration for the show. Philosophy Bakes Bread, so would you, Nancy, would you say that Philosophy Bakes Bread as the famous saying goes? Or that it does not? And how and why? And of course, since your students are listening, they want you to show your work.

McHugh: Yeah. So I absolutely think philosophy bakes bread. And I started, I became interested in philosophy because I thought it was a way of creating social change. I thought if we could all start thinking more critically and creatively and compassionately, that we can exist together better. And so for me, the philosophy helps us to ask and answer these really hard questions.

McHugh: I think we’re especially good at asking questions, in a very sort of incisive way, but I think we’re also good at raising and approaching these answers in really a critical fashion. And that that leads us naturally into the world that we’re in to sort of do something with those responses. So, if we come to the conclusion that something is wrong, there’s an injustice, I think we should do something about it. And I think philosophy gives us the tools to recognize injustice, for example. To think about what the alternative to injustice would look like. And then to maybe develop some steps to actually remediating that injustice.

McHugh: Like how do we insert ourselves into society to create change? And I think philosophy helps with each of those pieces to do it effectively and responsibly.

Weber: Wow, that’s awesome.

Cashio: Great answer.

Weber: There you have it folks. Well as you know, Nancy, we want people to know both the serious side of philosophy and I think we’ve gotten a dose of the serious side of philosophy, or a couple. We also want people to see the lighter side. And so in our next short bit in this last segment, we like to have that lighter side. We call this bit, Philosophunnies.

Weber: Say, “Philosophunnies.”

3-Year Old Sam: Philosophunnies.

Weber: Say, “Philosophunnies.”

3-Year Old Sam: Philosophunnies.

Weber: That’s my three year old, Sam.

McHugh: That’s so cute.

Weber: Well we’d love to hear from you, Nancy, if you’ve got a favorite joke or a funny fact, or a story about philosophy, about philosophers or about anything we’ve been talking about today.

Weber: Have you got a joke or a funny story to tell us?

McHugh: Yeah, so I’ll tell you a funny story from when I was a graduate student. So as I said, I got my PhD at Temple University. Joe Margolis was one of the faculty members there and Joe Margolis was sort of this fantastic philosopher who was able to integrate a number of different philosophical traditions together. So there’s these sort of three major areas, analytic, continental, and pragmatist. And he was unusual in his ability to synthesize those all together.

McHugh: So one day I was a grad student and I was at a talk, it was my second year. And I was actually a little bit shy then. And so, Alvin Goldman, who’s a philosopher at the University of Arizona, I believe, who does epistemology was a speaker. And I raised my hand and I asked a question. I was really proud of myself, because I had made sure that I wrote it down and thought about it and asked. And I tried to ask it really well. And so afterwards, and Helen Longineau, feminist epistemologist was there too. And afterwards, Joe Margolis comes up to me and he says, “Nancy, I have to tell you. That was a fantastic question. But I have to talk with you about how you should ask a question.”

McHugh: And so I’m just sort of waiting for it, and he says, “When you ask a question, you have to treat the person you’re questioning as if they’re a bird in a cage. And you circle around them, and then when they’re least expecting it, you attack.” And I was like perfect and if anybody had ever had Joe Margolis ask them a question, that’s exactly what he did. He’d ask these wonderful but really long questions. And by the time he finished the question, you were so overwhelmed by the amount of detail that was in the question, you really couldn’t figure out how to answer it.

McHugh: And so, that was my second year of grad school advice from Joe Margolis, which was just precious. And priceless.

Cashio: That’s fantastic.

Weber: That’s hilarious.

Cashio: That is hilarious. That reminds me of Ken Stickers. Has Ken Stickers ever asked you a question? He was a professor at SIU.

Weber: Ken Stickers is one of the nicest people you’ll meet and at my dissertation defense, he absolutely devastated me with incredibly difficult questions.

Cashio: Oh yeah, he’ll ask you a question-

Weber: He’s the nicest guy.

Cashio: He’ll just pay people compliments and then you think about it and you’re like, “No.”

McHugh: No, that didn’t happen.

Weber: No, he just devastated my argument, right? He can be so nice and supportive, and then he’ll ask the question that just gets you in the jugular. Like oh man, I don’t know what to say to that.

McHugh: Well Joe Margolis is remarkable because he is in his 90s and last thing I know, he was still teaching. So, which is just incredible.

Weber: Wow. That is awesome. That is awesome and that’s a great story, thank you so much. Anthony and I always pull together a few quick jokes too that we want to throw at you. We got a couple of them that have to do with cops or incarceration that we tried to keep light-hearted and avoid being mean-spirited.

Weber: Who’s telling the first one, Anthony?

Cashio: I’ll go. Eric, a cop pulled me over on the road, I was speeding. He said, “Papers.” I said, “Scissors, I win.” Then I drove away.

Weber: All right, I’ve got a question for you, why did the belt get arrested?

Cashio: Oh I don’t know, why?

Weber: Because it held up a pair of pants.

Cashio: I want to give a big shout out to sidewalks for keeping me off the streets all these years.

Weber: Thank you for indulging us, Nancy.

McHugh: You are very welcome.

Weber: Thank you for laughing, that’s great.

Weber: That’s right, that’s right.

Cashio: And last, but not least we want to take advantage of the fact that today we have powerful social media. I think that’s how we should say it every time. That allow two way communications even for programs like radio shows. So we want to invite our listeners to send us their thoughts about big questions that we raise on the show.

Weber: That’s right. Given that, Nancy, we’d love to know if you’ve got a question that you propose we ask our listeners for the segment we call, You Tell Me. Have you got a question to pose for our listeners?

McHugh: Well I have the question that I raised earlier. What is it that you will not do? So what line? Have you reflected upon like what line you’re drawing in the sand that you will not cross? And I think it’s different for each of us, but I think all of us need to ask that question, what is the thing that you will not do? And the problem I think, is we all tend to ask that question, or we encounter the need to ask that question too late. It’s when we’re in those really critical situations that we ask it, as opposed to asking it significantly in advance of that. And getting to the habit of checking in on that all the time.

Weber: I love it. That’s a really important point and it shows why philosophy matters.

McHugh: Yep.

Cashio: Yeah, and I’m looking forward to hearing the answers to that, especially from students in Dr. McHugh’s class. See what they come up with.

Weber: That’s right.

Cashio: Thank you everyone for listening to Philosophy Bakes Bread. Food for thought about life and leadership. Your host Anthony Cashio and Eric Weber, we’ve really been a tremendous conversation today, Nancy. Thank you for joining us. Doctor Nancy McHugh.

McHugh: Well thank you for having me.

Weber: Absolutely. I’ve been moved.

McHugh: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, this was a lot of fun so I really appreciate it.

Weber: Well we’re gonna have you back.

Cashio: Yeah, come back.

McHugh: That’d be great. I’ll come back.

Cashio: Plenty, I have so many questions I didn’t get to ask, it’s not even funny. So we’ve got lots to talk about.

Cashio: I hope our listeners have enjoyed the show as well and the conversation. And you’ll consider sending us your thoughts about anything you’ve heard today, anything you’d like to hear about in the future, or about the specific questions we’ve raised for you. What will you not do?

Weber: Indeed. Remember everyone, you can catch us on Twitter, Facebook and on our website at philosophybakesbread.com. And there you’ll find transcripts for many of our episodes. Thank to Drake Bolling, and undergraduate philosophy student at the University of Kentucky. Thank you, Drake.

Cashio: Thanks, Drake. Guys, check it out. The transcripts are really good. Drake’s doing an excellent job.

Weber: It’s a ton of work and he does a great job at it.

McHugh: That’s really great.

Weber: Yeah. Well one more thing, folks. If you want to support the show and/or to be more involved in the work of the society of philosophers in America, SOPHIA, the easiest thing to do is to go join and be a member at philosphersinamerica.com. Go learn about it.

Cashio: If you’re enjoying this show, and we hope you are, maybe you could take a quick second to rate and review us on iTunes or the podcast app on your phone or I guess Google Play will have it as well. A good review will help us reach out to more people and more audiences. And the more we reach, the more public our philosophy.

Weber: That’s right.

Cashio: And of course, you can always email us at philosphybakesbread@gmail.com and you can also call us and leave a short, recorded message with a question or a comment that we may be able to play on the show. And you can reach us at 859-257-1849, that’s 859-257-1849. Join us again next time on Philosophy Bakes Bread. Food for thought about life and leadership.

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