 Identifying Jane Addams as a philosopher requires appreciating the dynamic between theory and action reflected in her writing. Furthermore, Addams was a voracious reader and purveyor of the intellectual ideas of her time, such as evolutionary theory. Therefore, her writing is nuanced, with references that require a contextual understanding of pertinent ideas of the time. Reading Addams, one finds a wellspring of nascent feminist philosophical insight. Addams’ ethical philosophy was guided by the notion of sympathetic knowledge that she described as “the only way of approach to any human problem” (NCA 7). Sympathetic knowledge is a mingling of epistemology and ethics: knowing one another better reinforces the common connection of people such that the potential for caring and empathetic moral actions increases. Addams not only theorized about this idea, but she lived it. Sympathetic knowledge underwrote Addams’ approach to the diversity and staggering poverty (HHM) that she confronted in the immigrant neighborhood surrounding Hull House and allowed her to develop a precursor to contemporary feminist standpoint epistemology. Addams’ leadership among the American pragmatists in understanding the poor and oppressed resulted in a more radical form of pragmatism than Dewey and James, a social philosophy imbued with a class and gender consciousness.