Adrian Parker, Ph.D.
I draw on my own experiences and anecdotes of John to show how his qualities of eloquence, courage, and humility enabled him in the wake of the loss of parapsychology's place at Duke University, to re-instate parapsychology as an accredited university subject. We met by a series of apparently fortuitous events that first took me to Edinburgh and then led me to change from medicine to psychology. Without knowing of John's presence there, I had begun to be fascinated by hypnosis and psi, topics which I later discovered were the focus of his first project at Edinburgh.
In some respects, my personal experience of John is that he possessed many qualities which belonged to a bygone era, but these qualities also meant he was a man of his times by providing a steadfastness during was then a period of not only openness but also of social upheaval. It was just such qualities that enabled him to show that a research program in parapsychology could be conducted at Edinburgh without any threat to academia. It was this confidence created from his research and from his scholarly teaching which then provided the necessary and sufficient conditions for establishing the Koestler Chair at the university. Although John saw his role as executor of the Koestler Will as ethically preventing him from becoming its first professor, he possessed a psychological, philosophical and a parapsychological expertise which has rarely occurred since the days of William James. His critics were indeed met in a Jamesian manner with the rare gifts of a perceptiveness and an eloquence which enabled him to immediately grasp the nub of the argument being put forth and then to turn the owner around with a command of words which showed the door to common sense.
John's importance however did not diminish with the arrival of Bob Morris as professor at Edinburgh and the spread of parapsychology to other UK universities. John was active in the SPR, continued for some years as the editor of its journal, published his third and fourth books The Relentless Question (1990) and Parapsychology - A Concise History (1993) and edited a further one (with J. R. Smythies) The Case for Dualism (1989). He gave us a legacy not only in establishing university parapsychology but confronted us with the implications of a critical yet positive parapsychology, and for John this meant a parapsychology that gave a central position to the study of spontaneous phenomena as well as experimental research.
At a personal level, John Beloff, through what in practice meant sacrificing his own career prospects, gave me and others the opportunity of making a university career out of parapsychology and gave me a commitment to show that with sufficient determination and willpower, this opportunity can be realized.