Journalist and author one of whose claims to fame occurred in 1985 when the Koestler Chair of Parapsychology was established in the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He and his wife Cynthia left a bequest in their wills to make this possible. On Koestler’s death from leukemia and Parkinson’s disease, his wife, several years younger than he and apparently in good health, took her own life. A note explained that they had made an agreement to die together. They were a devoted couple and presumably wished to be together after death.
Koestler was born in Budapest and after studying in Vienna became a journalist and then an author who dealt with some of the central issues of his time. He became a communist, fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, was imprisoned under sentence of death, and wrote a book drawing on his own experience Spanish Testament (published as Dialogue with Death, Penguin, 1938). Koestler was British by naturalization and wrote in English. One of his books is The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959), in which Koestler claimed that scientific discovery occurred more by accident than design and likened scientists to sleepwalkers stumbling upon their knowledge while not being fully awake. In a more recent book, Insight and Outlook, Koestler speaks of Joseph Bank Rhine’s work as having ushered in a new Copernican revolution.