Professor Soble, emeritus at the University of New Orleans, died last year. Philosopher Raja Halwani at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago kindly shared this lovely tribute to his friend and collaborator:

A Tribute to Alan Soble

Raja Halwani

            Alan Soble died on March 5, 2025. I didn’t know that he had died, however, until June 26, 2026 (it seems that very few people in the philosophy world knew). I had emailed him about a week before I found out, but, when I didn’t hear from him for over a week, I had a bad feeling, as I knew he was sick when we had last communicated. So I googled him and the Wikipedia page popped up. When I read, “Alan Gerald Soble was …” my heart sank.

            Alan was one of the smartest contemporary philosophers I have ever known and read. He was the founder of the contemporary field of the philosophy of sex, and, to a lesser extent, the philosophy of love (“to a lesser extent” because love has more of a history in the annals of philosophy than does sex). He was deeply intelligent, insightful, with an analytic rigor rarely matched by other philosophers. He was thorough and meticulous in his work, pouring over every sentence and word, paying attention to every detail. (Whenever I wrote him an email, I went over it at least three times to make sure I was not making some whopper that he could reprimand me for.) His writing style was clear but also punchy and funny: once, in discussing conjugal sexual duties as found in St. Paul, he wrote, “Each spouse has a duty to engage in sex with the other spouse pretty much on demand … Exceptions include when the spouse is ill or getting closer to God, say by prayer. ‘Not tonight, I have a headache,’ is supplemented with ‘Not now, I’m with the Lord,’ but not ‘I really want to watch the game’” (“Sexual Gifts and Sexual Duties,” PoS8, p. 547).

He often complained about how sloppy much of philosophy is. He was often impatient with views he found to be mistaken or implausible, and he had nothing but contempt for views that could have been easily improved with a bit more research and thought. He punctured many holes in what he thought were philosophical illusions, such as the belief that human beings are (non-trivially) individually unique, or that we have some moral property, like dignity, that elevated us above other living creatures. To Alan, most human beings were like “mackerel,” blindly following trends and copying each other. We display irrational behavior in our daily actions and are driven and riven by vices and nasty emotions.

He thought that pornography shattered another illusion: our loftiness, our belief that we are somehow above non-human animals. And here lies one of his most insightful views: his attempts to save sex from the oppressive clutch of conservatism. In Alan’s hands, sex was not a dirty thing. It was something that we should enjoy doing without hang-ups. It was a subject worthy of philosophical reflection, if done properly. He lambasted those who tried to sanitize sex by hitching it to the wagon of love or reproduction, skewering what he once described as a bourgeoisie mentality regarding couple-hood and monogamy. Sex was animalistic, yes, but it is pleasurable and we are, after all, animals.

Alan argued that contrary to what many think, especially some feminist philosophers, pornographic images do not have inherent meanings, like subjugation and humiliation. It is up to us whether we see sexual degradation or sexual liberation in the images. Pornographic images, then, are polysemic: “we can see the woman eagerly performing fellatio as submissively subservient solely to the man’s desire, or as a sluttish glutton for her own pleasure, or as a woman enjoying sex without making excuses” (Pornography, Sex, and, Feminism, p. 98).

But he thought that the problems with feminist philosophy of pornography ran deeper: not only was it based on lack of knowledge of pornography and its diverse genres, it often also, unwittingly, allied itself with conservativism about sex. Thus, he went after feminist philosophers, often harshly, even crossing a line. This reached its peak perhaps in Pornography, Sex, and Feminism. Writing about the feminist criticism of pornography that pornography implies that women are mindless, mere sex objects, he says, “Hence … [according to this criticism] the message of victim pornography is false; there are for women higher callings, and some women achieve them. I would have thought, however, that being a mindless, masochistic slut [here, he is using the words of one feminist critic] might well be an achievement, something good, at least as good as being, say, a professor of philosophy at a third-rate American university” (p. 59). Pornography not only revealed the lie that we are above animals, it also showed us that chasing after and enjoying sex was something to be valued at least as much as what we think are noble pursuits—at least at third rate American universities (not sure what he would say about first rate American universities or about third rate non-American universities).

He also salvaged masturbation from the philosophical gutter, placing it on a par with those sexual activities, like heterosexual coitus, that philosophers, if they had to choose from among sexual activities, find some value in. The title of the latest iteration of his essay on masturbation (of which he produced a new version for every edition of The Philosophy of Sex, which is now in its 8^th edition) says it all: “Masturbation and the Continuum of Sexual Activities.” In it, he masterfully argued—and here I simplify—that a mouth fellating a penis, a mouth performing cunnilingus, a penis in an anus, or (inclusive “or”) a penis in a vagina, are of the same type of action as a hand stroking a penis or of a hand stimulating a clitoris—each involves one body part stimulating another body part. If the latter two are masturbatory actions, as we all agree they are, then either the former actions are also masturbatory or none of the actions are. Thus, masturbation becomes one with other sexual activities: they either morally rise together or fall together.

In his “Sexual Gifts and Duties,” Alan defended the proposal that there are duties of sexual actions toward those who are sexually deprived—a thesis to which most philosophers would react (and have reacted) by clutching their pearls. His 1982 essay, “Physical Attractiveness and Unfair Discrimination,” is a touchstone for contemporary discussions of “lookism,” which really got going two decades after his essay was first published. He knew the history of the philosophy of sex inside out—his 2009 essay, “A History of Erotic Philosophy” for the Journal of Sex Research is masterful. Indeed, his knowledge of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, and, certainly, Kant, with whom Alan philosophically fought in his essay about Kant’s view of perversion, turned his contributions to the philosophy of sex from brilliant pieces to erudite, brilliant pieces. And he was a fair fighter. For even though he disagreed with Kant’s philosophy of sex, he ensured that others got it right. This is clear in his “Sexual Use,” where he argued against those who misunderstood Kant, thinking that they can get around the Categorical Imperative’s prohibition of all but marital sex but ended up misconstruing what Kant was arguing. But perhaps his lasting impact on the field of the philosophy of sex—certainly the most ambitious—was being the editor of the 2006 encyclopedia Sex from Plato to Paglia: A Philosophical Encyclopedia, a reference work with a clever title that is a must on every philosophy of sex shelf.

(I do not mean to limit Alan’s contributions to the philosophy of sex—his contributions to philosophy of love, to philosophy of science and of social science, and to moral philosophy are excellent. Yet I worked with him mostly in philosophy of sex, hence my focus.)

To end on a more personal note, Alan and I had met a few times at APAs, but my friendship with him began when he asked me in 2005 to contribute two entries to Sex from Plato to Paglia, one on virtue ethics and one on casual sex. He must have liked what I have written because he asked me to contribute an essay to the fifth edition of The Philosophy of Sex (I combined virtue ethics with casual sex in that essay). After that, Alan invited me to be a co-editor of the sixth edition, along with him and Nicholas Power. I then stayed on as the lead editor of the seventh and eighth editions. Alan was getting older and more tired; he wanted to play smaller and smaller roles in the new editions. His main preoccupation at that point was polishing and re-polishing his essays for the next edition.

There is no doubt that Alan could be a difficult and prickly person. I won’t recount run-ins that he had with other philosophers—they know who they are and what happened, and I refuse to gossip (as Moira Rose says in Schitt’s Creek: gossip is “the devil’s telephone. Best to just hang up”). Make no mistake, Alan and I certainly had our difficult moments, given that we had worked closely together for years. I recall once a back-and-forth email exchange that got quite ugly at points. (It was about—of course—a stupid thing: whether virtue ethics or consequentialism was the superior moral theory.) It got so ugly that Sarah Hoffman, who was a co-editor for the seventh edition and who was cc’d on all the emails (which means that argument must have had its origins in something about the book) had to intervene. She was basically, like, “Just stop it you two!”

Despite our down moments, which I suppose are a feature of every friendship, my affection and respect for him never waned. Plus, there were aspects to him that very much appealed to me, personally, but that were, I’m guessing, not to everyone’s liking, and that made our friendship enjoyable and inspiring. For one, his dry, sometimes even pedestrian humor (he once advised me to get thicker glasses when I told him that I found Jimmy Kimmel attractive). For another, his acerbic, lashing wit. For another, his dark outlook on humanity. For yet another, his honesty, his willingness to say what was on his mind, often unfiltered. And the fact that these attributes came through not just in personal interactions, but in his writing, was, as the kids say, awesome. He thus nurtured my misanthropic tendencies (of which I am very proud). He modeled courage for me, whether academic or personal (though I might be a bit more polite than he was). He helped me become the philosopher that I am now.

The emails between us number in the hundreds (some of his subject lines are “Kvetching” and “More kvetching”). The first sentence of Alan’s last email to me, dated on January 29, 2025 was: “I’m going through tons of books and journals, in preparation for you know what.” The next sentence was: “Tossing out most of it.”

Classic, irreverent Alan.

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Comments are open for those who want to share other remembrances or who want to comment on the significance of his work.