Join us for a special coffee house featuring visiting student scholars Jack McKinnon and Preston Coolidge!
Open to Boston-area university students and young professionals.
Europe’s Golden Calf
Jack McKinnnon, Stanford University
The goal of this talk is to weigh the validity of a synthesized argument that asserts that Italian Fascism was a type of secular, political religion that was a spiritual reaction against theological nihilism. McKinnon argues that the loss of faith in God, with the advent of nihilism, left a spiritual vacuum in Europe, which was then amplified after the First World War. Within The Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile form a conception of the State that takes on the sociological and individual role of Nietzsche’s God.
Jack McKinnon is a Master’s student at Stanford University in California. He received his B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford in 2023. He is a senior instructor at the Rose Debate Institute in Palo Alto. After graduating in 2024, he plans to pursue his Ph.D. in philosophy.
The Licensed Dark Age
Preston Coolidge, Chapman University
The danger of storing valuable information in archives has become increasingly tenuous with the attacks on the British Library’s systems, and the ephemerality of licensed works is particularly noted in digital media, but less obvious in printed media. Using early 90’s RPGA publications as an example, Preston will show how, even in an age of digitalization, printed texts can de facto disappear in a span of just 20 years, and that this could pose a serious problem for future scholars of popular culture.
Preston Coolidge is a Computer Science major at Chapman University in Orange, California. Before studying at Chapman he was pursuing a BA in Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. His goal is to be useful enough that when the robots take over he can earn a slightly bigger cage.