Talk:Alan Soble
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Alan Soble provided me with a recent CV to help in creation of this article about him. If other editors would like to refer to this in deciding other details to include, feel free. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 18:48, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Soble Bio
The below is additional material provided by Soble himself. Please incorporate into the article as you see fit. (Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 05:36, 8 October 2005 (UTC))
Alan Gerald Soble (parents Sylvia Soble [from Camden and Atlantic City, New Jersey] and William Soble [Philadelphia, Pa.]) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 4, 1947. He received a B.S. in biology from Albright College (magna cum laude, 1969), and the M.A. in pharmacology (1972) and the Ph.D. in philosophy (1976) from the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1977, while an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, he founded The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love, and he served as its director until 1992. He is now Professor of Philosophy and University Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Orleans, and the recipient in 1998 of the U.N.O. Alumni Association's Career Achievement Award for Excellence in Research.
Soble is the author of Pornography, Sex, and Feminism (Prometheus, 2002), The Philosophy of Sex and Love: An Introduction (Paragon House, 1998), Sexual Investigations (New York University Press, 1996), The Structure of Love (Yale University Press, 1990), and Pornography: Marxism, Feminism, and the Future of Sexuality (Yale University Press, 1986). He is the editor of Sex, Love, and Friendship (Rodopi, 1997), The Philosophy of Sex (Rowman and Littlefield, 1st edition, 1980; 2nd edition, 1991; 3rd edition, 1997; 4th edition, 2002), and Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love (Paragon House, 1989; corrected and reprinted, 1999). His essays in ethics, philosophy of the social sciences, social and political philosophy, and love and sexuality have appeared in the journals Metaphilosophy, Social Epistemology, The Monist, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Social Theory and Practice, Apeiron, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Social Philosophy, and International Journal of Applied Philosophy. His reviews have appeared in Ethics, Journal of Value Inquiry, Canadian Philosophical Reviews, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, and Teaching Philosophy. He wrote the "Sexuality and Sexual Ethics" entry for the Encyclopedia of Ethics (Garland, 1992; 2nd edition, Routledge, 2001), the "La Morale Sexuelle" entry for the Dictionnaire de philosophie morale (Presses Universitaires de France, 1996); the "Sexuality, Philosophy of" entry for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998); and the "Philosophy of Sexuality" entry for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2000): <http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/s/sexualit.htm>.
The recipient of a Fulbright Teaching grant for 1991-92, Soble spent the academic year in Hungary teaching philosophy of science, social philosophy, and the philosophy of love and sex at Eötvös Loránd University and the Budapest Technical University. During that year, he wrote two essays, "A Szexualitás Filozófiájáról" ("The Philosophy of Sex"), Magyar Filozófiai Szemle (Hungarian Philosophical Review), 1992; and "Egyesülés és Jóakarat" ("Union and Concern"), Athenaeum (1994); both were translated into Hungarian by Módos Magdolna, and the latter was extensively revised for publication in Roger Lamb, ed., Love Analyzed (Westview, 1997).
His daughters Rebecca Jill and Rachel Emöke were born in 1969 and 1993. Pictures of Rebecca and Rachel, as well as scans of Rachel's art, her comic strips, and her first book, can be found on this web site. He welcomes comments on his writings at asoble@uno.edu. He is currently working on Immanuel Kant's metaphysics and ethics of sexuality. One piece of this puzzle has been published as "Sexual Use and What To Do About It: Internalist and Externalist Sexual Ethics," Essays in Philosophy 2:2 (2001), at <http://www.humboldt.edu/~essays/soble.html>; a revised and expanded version can be found in his Philosophy of Sex, 4th edition. Another piece, "Kant and Sexual Perversion," was published in The Monist 86:1 (2003).
[edit] Soble Autobio
A Mildly (Un)expurgated Autobiography
I was born in 1947 in the Richmond area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, making me a Northeastern, Russian[1] Jew and a quintessential baby-boomer. The family (Mom ['22] and Dad ['19], Phyllis ['45], Janet ['50], and I) later lived in one of the many row homes of Philadelphia's Oxford Circle neighborhood, where I played bottlecaps and stick ball in the streets (with Robert Haney, Barry Caplan, and Ned Finklestein), watched the Phillies lose, with Robin Roberts and Richie Ashburn, at Connie Mack Stadium, and vaguely prepared for my bar mitzvah at Temple Shalom on Roosevelt Boulevard. Then we moved to a duplex in Bustleton, well below Somerton, where what I mostly did was play chess (with Howard Fine, Mike Shahade, and Ken Masover), although I did put in some volunteer weekends feeding invalids at the Moss Rehabilitation Hospital in Logan (and was there mocked plenty by the intriguingly sexual teenage candy-stripers) and worked for a year at nights in an old-fashioned ice-cream and over-the-counter drug store in Frankford as the most nerdish soda-jerk in the county. I went to Cornell Elementary School, Fels Junior High, Northeast Philadelphia High School and, in the summers, boy scout camp (with Norman Zimbalist and Gary Anderson). Theagail Sigismond called me a "cold fish" for not leaving an after-school chess game to secret ourselves in a dark, empty room at the other end of the hall. My friend Tom Smith, not known to be a very serious chess player, did accept her offer.
[1][My father's family originated in Russia and immigrated at the turn of the century. The family name had been Frankel, but to ease leaving Russia the family pretended to have the name "Sobelov," which was the name of a high ranking military official (and no relation). The name was changed by various branches of the family to Soble, Sobel, Sobeloff, and Bell. My grandfather, Max, owned an electrical motor store on Arch Street near 6th in downtown Philadelphia. I went to that dark and oily store several times as a young child before he died in the 1950s. My maternal grandmother, Gertrude, owned a small hair-styling shop in Atlantic City on Connecticut Avenue between Pacific and Atlantic Avenues. My family descended on her two-room, back-of-the-store apartment every summer for our vacation. Both buildings are gone. My father (W3QXT) worked as a contract negotiator for the U.S. Army for many years, and usually took on extra jobs at night and on the weekends, including bill collection; my mother (W3SLF) worked for a dentist, doing just about everything.]
I finished high school in January, 1965, and then worked for eight months as a stock boy at Ingber's on Erie Avenue (handbag manufacturing, largely from goatskin), where I learned about checkers, the Detroit Tigers, gambling, and vodka. In September, 1965, I went off to Albright College in Reading (B.S., biology, 1969), thinking I was going to be a physician. During the summers, I worked in a factory that produced munitions for the U.S. Army, putting together an aiming mechanism for hand grenade launchers and inspecting the parts and assemblies made by other workers. (In the factory, owned by a Jew, I strongly sensed and was the butt of the anti-semitism of these fellows.) At college, Roy Schwartz ("The Big Guy") and Mark Cutler ("Cuts") nicknamed me "Big A," and it stuck, because I did nothing but study and ace my exams. (Roy and Mark are both, incredibly, physicians today. They were roomies; their living space was always smelly and dirty.) I decided I was going to excel academically, which I did. My main activity outside school work was writing for and editing, with Ralph Horowitz, the student newspaper, The Albrightian, which we turned from a bland school-event-and-sports weekly into a radical consciounsess-raising rag, for which we were shut down by the administration (right after our barely obscene issue on obscentity in the media). Given my school work and newspaper commitments, I suffered socially. Yet, mysteriously, at the beginning of my senior year at college I married a nice girl, who soon gave me the gift of Rebecca, and I then went, with family, to the University of Buffalo (M.A., pharmacology, 1972), thinking I was going to do biomedical research on hallucinogens and neurotransmitters. I was now a husband and father, and still did almost nothing but study. I gained the skill (from Robert J. McIsaac) to record with microelectrodes from single ganglion cells in South American toad nerve preparations. At some point I was recruited into a radical political organization and spent one night in jail for poking my nose into a labor dispute at the DuPont plant in Niagara Falls. Under the guidance of Richard Hull, I finished my studies at Buffalo in 1976 with a Ph.D. in philosophy. The ending of this first marriage coincided with a collapse of my interest in spending long days and nights in a laboratory doing science, and I thought taking up philosophy would be more personally fulfilling. It was. I actually played pool and had a beer several nights a week at Slomba's or the Central Park Grill, and started playing chess again, one year winning the Buffalo championship. I began to read more widely, coming to appreciate Iris Murdoch and Philip Roth (and many others) and spending too much time in the bathtub or on a bus reading British (e.g., Sayers, Crispin) and American (e.g., Stout, Hammett, Chandler) mysteries. I worked for two years in the evenings and on the weekends as a projectionist in Buffalo's only pornographic movie theater; otherwise, I fed myself through the food stamp program and paid the rent from a small graduate student assistantship. On occasion, I demonstrated that Theagail's "cold fish" remark was not altogether true. After the marriage, I lived with a wonderful woman for several months; she was, in her own words, my "brave new world." Cuts, who once came to visit, called her my "California blonde," while I called her "Teen." A monkey with a brain (better than mine), and still I wasn't satisfied.
I went to school in the decade 1965-1976, at the height of student activism on U.S. campuses, which experience affected my scholarly career. It provided me with both the confidence (or the insufferability) and the cultural context to strike out in my own direction. While an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, my first full-time academic appointment (I had taught a course nearly every semester while a philosophy graduate student at Buffalo), I founded The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love ("but why those two in combination, or why those two at all?" I have often asked myself; other inquiring minds, too, wanted to know) and served as its director for fifteen years (1977-1992). It was during my two years in Austin (still a smallish town in 1976-78) that I discovered the enchantment and nuances of contemporary burlesque (topless and sometimes bottomless dancing on stage, which you can also find in the 21st century in New Orleans) and began to develop my iconoclastic interest in philosophical matters pertaining to sex and love. I also flirted with learning how to play the alto sax, but was horrible at it, and at some point had to pawn that treasure to pay the rent. My intellectual heroes, from early on, were Freud and Marx. Later I began to admire also Kierkegaard and Milan Kundera. But never Putnam or Kripke. I became a kind of "professor of desire" and eventually (after many mistakes) realized -- or it dawned on me -- that the sexual interest shown in me by a number of persons was largely due to their mere curiosity about the sex-life of someone who could and would lecture for hours and hours about (the philosophy of) sexuality. And that those who fled from me were frightened by the same fact. Thank goodness for the light sarcasm of the one cutie pie who dared to address me as the "professor of perversion."
Although my essays in professional journals over the years have dealt with various topics in ethics, the philosophy of the natural and social sciences, and social and political philosophy, all my books have focused on moral and conceptual issues surrounding sex and love. During the prime time of my writing career I have so far published five books and six anthologies in this area: Pornography, Sex, and Feminism (2002); The Philosophy of Sex and Love (1998); my favorite, Sexual Investigations (1996); The Structure of Love (1990); Pornography: Marxism, Feminism, and the Future of Sexuality (1986); Sex, Love, and Friendship: Studies of the Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love (1997); The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings (1980, 1991, 1997, 2002); and Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love (1989; reprinted and corrected, 1999). I have also composed four encyclopedia entries on the philosophy of sexuality and have had a little bit of my writings on sex and love translated into German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Chinese. I am currently at work editing an encyclopedia devoted to the philosophy of sex.
- "No one knows what will be attractive to a woman and I suppose that anything is possible, but in my experience, if women know that you've got several degrees and are interested in philosophy and publish articles and so on, they run for the hills. It's best to say that you're a cop or a construction worker, as women tend to like their men 'stupid and strong' -- as my sister explained to me. This is because they expect to do most of the thinking in a relationship anyway." [A small gem from "Gilligan," posted 27 March 2001 on a web site, "Sex and the Meaning of Life, part 2," www.bluereality.org/discuss/messages/533.html.]
In a quickly-passing ten-year period, from 1976 to 1986, I moved around the country as a gypsy scholar, teaching at six different universities or colleges, at a time when it was difficult for many Ph.D.s to find regular employment in philosophy departments. That sort of existence -- moving from Buffalo to Austin to Dallas to New Orleans to Bloomington to Boston to Norton (Massachusetts) to Minnesota to Atlanta to St. Joseph to New Orleans again -- forced me to develop (or reinforce and maintain) my ability to live and be alone, in several senses. (Maybe I should have stayed in the laboratory.) The best year in that decade was that spent in Boston -- I taught at Wheaton College in Norton, at the time still a women's school, and which was populated by, it seemed then, an inordinate number of delightfully sassy cockteasers attired in tight jeans and high heels -- where I had access to M.I.T., B.U., Harvard, the movies, the lectures, the COOP, and New York. I was finally permanently hired by the University of New Orleans in 1986. Since 1993, I have been Professor of Philosophy at U.N.O.; in 1994 I was appointed University Research Professor; and in 1998 I received the U.N.O. Alumni Association Career Achievement Award for Excellence in Research. (I have never received an award for excellence in fucking.) Awarded a Fulbright Teaching grant for 1991-92, I spent the academic year teaching philosophy at two universities in Budapest, Hungary. In 1990, thinking that my career was finally on track, I married a Hungarian woman, Szabó Sára, with the idea of trying family life again; she enjoyed returning to her native land for this fellowship year, and the marriage eventually produced a wonderful child, Rachel [Rahél], who is by far the love of my life. That marriage ended in 1997. (I have had no better luck than Peter Tarnopol or Nathan Zuckerman.) In 1994 I received two grants that supported another trip to Budapest, where I lectured for a month at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Budapest Technical University. I have fond memories of all the time I spent in Budapest; I wish I could live there, and attend a concert every night at the Liszt or Vigadó with my friend Fehér Márta.
Over the years, I have found my philosophical perspectives changing. Early in my philosophical journey, as a graduate student, I was captivated by John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism and his (perhaps incompatible) defense of individuality and freedom in On Liberty; in the middle stage of my academic career, I found myself drawn to modified Marxism and feminism; and in the later portion of this adventure I re-established allegiance to utilitarianism, although of a more hedonistic kind (as evidenced by Pornography, Sex, and Feminism). I had become disenchanted with the mediocre, formulaic, dogmatic, and unimaginative writings and rhetoric of marxists and feminists on sexuality and other matters (see, for example, my essays "In Defense of Bacon" and "Bad Apples: Feminist Politics and Feminist Scholarship"). My current research focuses on Immanuel Kant's metaphysics and ethics of sexuality. Some of this work has been published in Essays in Philosophy as "Sexual Use and What to Do about It: Internalist and Externalist Sexual Ethics" (reprinted, revised and extended, in the 4th edition of my Philosophy of Sex); some of it was delivered as my Keynote Lecture at Washburn University's Mountain-Plains Philosophy Conference, October 2000; and more of it appears in The Monist as "Kant and Sexual Perversion." Eventually I will put all this together as a book.
