People are too smart and too inventive, the variability of daily experience too complex, to be so easily cabined.
My themes cannot be reduced to a single encapsulable thesis. … I care about what people thought, what they actually did, what they wrote, and the stories they told, not just yesterday, but 2,500 years ago. Would that academics had the knowledge (and irony) of a middling singer of an heroic tale. Too often these discussions have the oppressive style of complacent and predictable sermonizing: lip service to, or defenses of, various safely proper positions. In some small way is my revenge on academic discussions of justice that have painted revenge as an unnuanced Vice in a morality play. Perhaps because he is unaware that some contemporary philosophers have linked justice with revenge and have seen some virtues in vindictiveness and vengeance, 1 Miller has an irritating way of portraying himself as a lone voice crying in the wilderness - one of the few contemporary writers who is not captive to a pious and sentimental rejection of anything that even smacks of revenge: Miller's book is an attempt to explore these historical cultural origins, to argue that - once these origins are fully understood - we should view them far more sympathetically than we generally do, and to maintain that in many ways these ideas are to be welcomed when retained in contemporary thought and practice. Just as the concept of absolute human rights depends, in my view, on the religious framework in which it was originally imbedded, so may many of our ideas of retributive justice - or even justice in general - depend on ideas of revenge, of paying back, of getting even - ideas that most contemporary philosophers want to reject as primitive, irrational, and even evil.
#An eye for an eye full#
Why then bother to review the book in a journal devoted to philosophy? The answer is to be found in the fact that contemporary concepts and norms of interest to philosophers often come to us still trailing, in ways we are often unwilling to recognize, their distant historical antecedents - antecedents that may be required for a full understanding and evaluation of those concepts and norms. Miller is a cultural historian, in particular a writer who has for years been immersed in the study of revenge cultures, and one should thus not expect to find in this book the kind of philosophical analyses and arguments that a reader of this journal might reasonably expect. The Spanish actor won an Oscar for best supporting actor in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and went on to play Raoul Silva, the villain of the James Bond film Skyfall.This is not a book in academic philosophy.
Ojos del Mundo was reluctant to speculate about how much they hoped the auction might raise but said that even the reserve price of €9,000 (£7,850) would pay for 1,300 eye tests €30,000 would fund four years of training for an ophthalmologist and €50,000 would meet the cost of 715 cataract operations.īardem, 53, rose to fame in the 1992 film Jamón Jamón, in which he played opposite a teenage Penélope Cruz. Javier’s eyes will open other eyes.”Īccording to the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, 161 million people suffer from uncorrected sight, of whom 100 million have operable cataracts.
It’s a mark of identity that has borne witness to special moments that can now become a part of anyone who bids for this inspiring and original photograph. “Javier has been very generous in sharing with us something as personal and exclusive as his iris.
02:05 Photo of Javier Bardem's iris for auction in fundraising campaign for Eyes of the World – videoĪt the launch of the campaign, Anna Barba, director of Ojos del Mundo, said that as well as raising funds, the foundation wanted to raise awareness of avoidable blindness, adding that 90% of visually impaired people live in the world’s poorest regions, and 55% are women.
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