Skeptical Community Mourns the Loss of Robert Todd Carroll

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Susan Gerbic
October 10, 2016

Robert Carroll, philosopher, CSI Fellow, and prominent skeptic widely known for his online Skeptics Dictionary, died from pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer August 25, 2016. He was 71. His legacy lives on through his work, his writings, his inspiration, and in the thousands of students who sat in his classroom where he taught critical thinking skills. Our heart goes out to his family, especially his wife of 48 years Leslie, daughters Jennifer and Allison, sons-in-law Rodney and Daniel, and his grandchildren Olivia and Flynn.

Before there was Wikipedia, there was The Skeptic’s Dictionary. It was conceived and managed by this one amazing person, Robert Todd Carroll. He started it in 1994 after taking a community education class with his wife Leslie, learning about the Internet, email, and HTML.

Carroll earned his PhD in philosophy in 1974 from the University of California at San Diego. A professor of philosophy from 1977 to 2007 at Sacramento City College, Carroll initially began the Dictionary with rewritten lectures from his classes. Over time the website http://skepdic.com morphed into the workhorse it is today with more than 85,000 hyperlinks and 5,500 files. It receives more than 400,000 visits a month. In 2003 it was published in book form by John Wiley and Sons.

In 2010 CSI made him a well-deserved Fellow. Starting in March 2012 Bob appeared on the Skepticality Podcast with a regular segment called “Unnatural Virtue.”

http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/robert_carroll