This article employs the satellite as a methodological lens to reconceptualize China’s Great Leap Forward, investigating this movement as an aesthetic crusade rather than a mere cause of political and economic pandemonium. Emerging as the movement’s most prevalent entity, the satellite underwent protean transformations—from an epitome of the Cold War to an emblem of socialist utopia, from its initial embodiment in popular science books to its embedment in mythologies, and from a contagious trope in bureaucratese to the most indispensable constituent in the creation of arts for the masses. Nevertheless, due to its belated materialization, the satellite emerged not as other socialist objects whose materiality was taken as a given, but as an object-yet-to-be-made, one that best articulates the paradoxes of Maoist material abundance, likewise suspended between fantasy and fulfilment. In this light, I argue that the satellite becomes a ‘thing’, one that exceeds its physicality, exploits the agency of words, and gained regulative potency. Drawing on newspapers, memoirs, operas, poems, folksongs, and visuals, I delineate the satellite’s encounters with politicians, cadres, writers, peasants, and workers, mapping its sanctification into a fetishized object that encapsulates Maoist China’s struggles, with its ideological contests, political visions, historical legacies, and class conflicts.

This article focuses on a set of aesthetic debates that took place in China in the late 1950s. By exploring the main arguments presented by different thinkers, particularly the writings of Zhu Guanqian and Li Zehou, this article demonstrates how the aesthetics took part in the ideological formation of the new socialist state. From the debates, we observe the tensions between the complexity of the material-political and the reductionism of the state ideology. We also recognize why and how aesthetics could be such an important site of political contestation in this young socialist country, and how the interactions between human senses and the material world are essential to arts universally. The dominant materialist aesthetics presented in the debate was less a theory of things than a theory of the social. This historical materialist approach might be useful as a social critique; however, when handled dogmatically, it not only rejects the autonomy of things, but also disallows art works to reflect the complex human interactions with the material world beyond economic power relations. We can find more sophisticated analysis in Zhu's aesthetic theory, which tries to incorporate the interactions between the subjects and the objects into materialism.

Cyber warfare and the advent of computer network operations have forced us to look again at the concept of the military objective. The definition set out in Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol I – that an object must by its nature, location, purpose or use, make an effective contribution to military action – is accepted as customary international law; its application in the cyber context, however, raises a number of issues which are examined in this article. First, the question of whether data may constitute a military objective is discussed. In particular, the issue of whether the requirement that the definition applies to ‘objects’ requires that the purported target must have tangible or material form. The article argues on the basis of both textual and contextual analysis that this is not required, but it contends that it may prove to be useful to differentiate between operational- and content-level data. The article then examines the qualifying contribution of military objectives such as their nature, location, purpose or use, and questions whether network location rather than geographical location may be used as a qualifying criterion in the cyber context. The final part of the article addresses the question of whether the particular ability of cyber operations to effect results at increasingly precise levels of specificity places an obligation on a party to an armed conflict to define military objectives at their smallest possible formulation – that is, a small piece of code or component rather than the computer or system itself. Such a requirement would have significant implications for the cyber context where much of the infrastructure is dual use, but the distinction between civilian objects and military objectives is a binary classification.

This article presents the case for a progressive interpretation of the notion of military objectives in international humanitarian law (IHL), bringing computer data within the scope of this concept. The advent of cyber military operations has presented a dilemma as to the proper understanding of data in IHL. The emerging orthodoxy, represented by the 2013 Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, advances the argument that the intangible nature of data renders it ineligible to be an object for the purposes of the rules on targeting in IHL. This article, on the contrary, argues that because of its susceptibility to alteration and destruction, the better view is that data is an object within the meaning of this term under IHL and thus it may qualify as a military objective. The article supports this conclusion by means of a textual, systematic and teleological interpretation of the definition of military objectives found in treaty and customary law. The upshot of the analysis presented here is that data that does not meet the criteria for qualification as a military objective must be considered a civilian object, with profound implications for the protection of civilian datasets in times of armed conflict.

Schopenhauer's claim that the essence of the world consists in Wille encounters well-known difficulties. Of particular importance is the conflict of this metaphysical claim with his restrictive account of conceptuality. This paper attempts to make sense of Schopenhauer's position by restoring him to the context of post-Kantian debate, with special attention to the early notebooks and Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. On the reconstruction suggested here, Schopenhauer's philosophical project should be understood in light of his rejection of post-Kantian metaphilosophy and his opposition to German Idealism.

Neural correlates exist for a basic component of logical formulae, PREDICATE(x). Vision and audition research in primates and humans shows two independent neural pathways; one locates objects in body-centered space, the other attributes properties, such as colour, to objects. In vision these are the dorsal and ventral pathways. In audition, similarly separable “where” and “what” pathways exist. PREDICATE(x) is a schematic representation of the brain's integration of the two processes of delivery by the senses of the location of an arbitrary referent object, mapped in parietal cortex, and analysis of the properties of the referent by perceptual subsystems.

The brain computes actions using a few “deictic” variables pointing to objects. Parallels exist between such nonlinguistic variables and linguistic deictic devices. Indexicality and reference have linguistic and nonlinguistic (e.g., visual) versions, sharing the concept of attention. The individual variables of logical formulae are interpreted as corresponding to these mental variables. In computing action, the deictic variables are linked with “semantic” information about the objects, corresponding to logical predicates.

Mental scene descriptions are necessary for practical tasks of primates, and preexist language phylogenetically. The type of scene descriptions used by nonhuman primates would be reused for more complex cognitive, ultimately linguistic, purposes. The provision by the brain's sensory/perceptual systems of about four variables for temporary assignment to objects, and the separate processes of perceptual categorization of the objects so identified, constitute a pre-adaptive platform on which an early system for the linguistic description of scenes developed.