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In Memoriam for 2013

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 For the last four years I've compiled an "In Memoriam" presentation for The Amazing Meeting each July. I think it is importanthat the skeptical community remember the people we've lost and the work they've done to make the world a more rational place. (You can watch the presentation from the most recent TAM 2013 online here).

I started doing this because I thought it was a good idea that no one else had taken up. It is important to record our history, and many of these people toil in relative obscurity and thus do not receive prominent obituaries in the news, or sometimes even notice in the skeptic blogs.

 

I was reminded of that this year when I discovered two deaths that had occurred in the spring of 2011 - one a prominent skeptic, the other a pseudoscience promoter - that had gone largely unnoticed in our community for two years. The skeptic was C.E.M. Hansel, a British psychologist and critic of parapsychology who was among the early supporters of CSICOP. He wrote for Skeptical Inquirer and was until recently listed as a CSI Fellow, though he had died in March 2011. The pseudoscience promoter was Max Toth, a devotee of "pyramid power" in the 1970s.  Daniel Loxton remembered Toth in a blog post recently when he discovered the man had died in April 2011. That these obituaries have eluded my searches back in 2011 underscored how difficult it can be to record the history of skepticism.

Of course our annual meeting at TAM is not the only time to think about history.  The end of the year is a time to look back as well, and so below I've compiled an updated a list of obituaries for the calendar year 2013.  

 

This year we've lost both eminent skeptics such as Narendra Dabholkar and Robert Steiner as well as notorious paranormalists and charlatans such as Sylvia Browne and Harold Camping.  But the lists below include a number of less well-known persons who may have simply supported skepticism, or worked in the allied fields of secularism, humanism, atheism and so on.  The links on each name lead to more information about that person.

 

Please take a moment to remember these people and their contributions to the long history of scientific skepticism.

In Memoriam

Skeptics, scientists and friends of the JREF.

Passages

Others with some connection to skepticism.

Thank you to Peter Bowditch, Sharon Hill, Jim Lippard, Daniel Loxton, Steve Novella and Robert Sheaffer for their help in compiling this list.

 

You can get a daily dose of the history of skepticism with JREF’s free Today in Skeptic History app for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. You can also subscribe for a daily fact on Twitter or Facebook.

 


Tim Farley is a JREF Research Fellow, he blogs at skeptools.com