Famed English privateer Francis Drake navigates the Pacific Northwest on a clandestine search for the fabled Northwest Passage, aided by Portuguese sea secret pilot Nuñez da Moreira. Left on the rugged California coast and sent on a perilous secret mission, Moreira survives only to face the dreaded Spanish Inquisition and, under torture, reveals secrets of Drake's voyage and that California is an island.The Spanish government chooses to allow the geographi...

Capitalism is destroying the world and crushing humanity. We need a better one.This book, although a memoir is not simply a chronology of a life but a personalised history of a movement. It isnot the drawing of a line under a life, but the turning of a page. Briggs weaves the personal with the political. It is a communist's journey; a political journey that led him to Moscow and beyond. It traces the history of the communist movement in Australia across six decades...

This book presents a philosophical approach to probability and probabilistic thinking, considering the underpinnings of probabilistic reasoning and modeling, which effectively underlie everything in data science. The ultimate goal is to call into question many standard tenets and lay the philosophical and probabilistic groundwork and infrastructure for statistical modeling. It is the first book devoted to the philosophy of data aimed at working scientists and calls for a new consideration ...

As the sun rises on China and sets on America, the world holds its breath. China, the USA and Capitalism's Last Crusade looks at the rise of China and the decline of the USA but from a different angle. William Briggs argues that this struggle for economic supremacy is being played out against a much bigger backdrop; the decline of the economic structure of capitalism. In this sense, the decline of the USA is portrayed as that larger economic decline in microcosm. Briggs examines the relati...

The veritable tsunami of anxieties that are affecting individual lives, the increasingly dysfunctional nature of society and the potential catastrophes of global conflict and of climate change, have a common cause. The inability of capitalism or the state to respond to existential crises and internal contradictions is the cause of what William Briggs terms A Cauldron of Anxiety. Briggs defends a Marxist perspective that would challenge this and provides an optimistic vision for the future....

Will capitalism survive forever?Capitalism has always lived in and with crisis. Wars, revolutions, economic depression and repeated recessions, the threat of nuclear annihilation and ecological disaster have all failed to break the dominance of this economic and political system.Challenging the predominance of capitalism in a world fraught with inequalities, this book returns to classical Marxism to reaffirm its relevance. It explores the contradictions within capi...

'Briggs tackles head-on the zone of conflict that Marx never quite got to, though not for lack of ambition. How do nation-states both manage and contest the military-industrial surges of global capitalism? Arguing the novel thesis that Stalin did good work for capitalism, offering its defenders an open goal to score against Marxism, Removing the Stalin Stain presents a clearly argued and outward-facing Marxist analysis of contemporary politics.' Terrell Carver, Professor o...

The standard rules of probability can be interpreted as uniquely valid principles in logic. In this book, E. T. Jaynes dispels the imaginary distinction between 'probability theory' and 'statistical inference', leaving a logical unity and simplicity, which provides greater technical power and flexibility in applications. This book goes beyond the conventional mathematics of probability theory, viewing the subject in a wider context. New results are discussed, along with applications of pro...

John R. Searle has made profoundly influential contributions to three areas of philosophy: philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of society. This volume gathers together in accessible form a selection of his essays in these areas. They range widely across social ontology, where Searle presents concise and informative statements of positions developed in more detail elsewhere; artificial intelligence and cognitive science, where Searle assesses the current state of the ...

Probability: A Philosophical Introduction introduces and explains the principal concepts and applications of probability. It is intended for philosophers and others who want to understand probability as we all apply it in our working and everyday lives. The book is not a course in mathematical probability, of which it uses only the simplest results, and avoids all needless technicality.The role of probability in modern theories of knowledge, inference, induction, causation...

Gilles Deleuze once claimed that ‘modern science has not found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it needs.’ The Force of the Virtual responds to this need by investigating the consequences of the philosopher’s interest in (and appeal to) ‘the exact sciences.’ In exploring the problematic relationship between the philosophy of Deleuze and science, the original essays gathered here examine how science functions in respect to Deleuze’s concepts of time and space, how science accounts ...

The equation "Mind = Machine" is false. This pocket lexicon of "neuromythology" shows why. Taking a series of key words such as calculation, language, information and memory, Professor Tallis shows how their misuse has a lured a whole generation into accepting the computational model of the mind.First of all these words were used literally in the description of the human mind. Then computer scientists applied them metaphorically to the workings of their machines. And finally, their metapho...