TEHRAN (MNA) - Professor Martin Jay says despite different views in both Western and Eastern philosophy dialogue over theory and practice “would be a productive effort”.

“I would agree that a dialogue about the ways in which the theory/practice nexus has been addressed in different contexts would be a productive effort,” Jay, a professor of history in the University of California, told the Mehr News Agency.
Following is the text of the interview:
Q: “Philosophy: theory and practice” is the main subject of the World Philosophy Day in 2010 in Iran. Can this subject help develop deep dialogue between Western and Eastern philosophers?
A: Now you are posing a very complicated question, which would require a book or more to answer satisfactorily! Western philosophy has developed many different, often contradictory responses to the challenge of relating something called ""theory""--itself a heatedly contested term--to actions of one or sort or another in the world. Although I have no direct knowledge, I would imagine that thinkers in the disparate traditions that are grouped under the rubric ""eastern"" have also come to widely different conclusions, many of which are likely to correspond to those developed in ""the west."" But, of course, not all would be the same, so I would agree that a dialogue about the ways in which the theory/practice nexus has been addressed in different contexts would be a productive effort.
Q: Summer is a vacation period for university professors. What is your concept of the disengagement? How much is it necessary for continuing research and thinking in other periods?
A: In America, productive university faculty normally uses their three-month summer breaks to catch up on the research and writing they have been unable to do during the semesters they teach. Sometimes, we are given funds to travel or to hire research assistants for our work. Faculty who need to teach summer sessions for monetary reasons--usually at the early stages of their careers when they are starting families or buying houses--lose the opportunity to make progress on their research projects. But those fortunate enough to have the time to themselves often make great strides in their research and writing. Although the period serves as a kind of vacation, allowing us to recharge our batteries, it really is more of an opportunity to focus on the scholarly work that we find harder to pursue when we are in the middle of teaching and administration. I hope that scholars in Iran are also able to devote their energies to their work when they get a comparable break from the classroom.
Q: How do you read the texts of your disciplines? Do you write some important points of the texts which you read? Do you repeat your reading of those texts? Do you hold dialogue with other people about those texts for understanding the deep layers of the texts?
A: I always read texts in my discipline and in fact scholarly texts in general with a pencil in my hand. I bracket the sentences that move the argument along, perhaps about ten per cent of the whole, underline the really important points and have a notational system for specific threads that I may be following at the time. For example, when I wrote my book Songs of Experience every time I would see a reference to ""experience"" I would make an ""e"" in the margin. When I went back to re-read these books, they were already pre-edited by me and thus much easier to summarize in my mind. As for reading with others, I often try to teach books I am most interested in so that I have to prepare them for my students and discuss it with them. At times in my career, I have belonged to study groups with other colleagues for the purpose of collective discussions of books.
*****Martin Jay is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a renowned intellectual historian and his research interests have been groundbreaking in connecting history with other academic and intellectual activities, such as the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, other figures and methods in continental social theory, cultural criticism, and historiography among many others.