The Problem of Spatial Stratification for Addams's Philosophy of Perplexity: Lessons from the Charity Visitor

This paper looks to Jane Addams’s literary practice as one resource for theorizing about inclusion in contexts of socially and economically based spatial stratification. Addams is concerned with spatial stratification because it exacerbates the epistemic limitations already inherent in human subjectivity. The paper claims that Addams makes use of her writings as a mechanism for expanding her social epistemology beyond the walls of Hull House. The paper looks to Addams’s fictional charity visiter in Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) as one example of this. Drawing from the work of Charlene Haddock Seigfried and Maurice Hamington, the paper focuses its consideration of Addams’s social epistemology to her philosophy of perplexity and its result, sympathetic knowledge. The paper closes by exploring some important insights from the example for thinking about sympathetic knowledge in contexts of spatial stratification.