Between You and I — 2009 ·

Dialogical Phenomenology

By Beata Stawarska

“Between You and I: Dialogical Phenomenology moves beyond the tradition of Cartesian-Kantian philosophy through one of its progeny, transcendental phenomenology, toward an interdisciplinary project, dialogical phenomenology. Rather than critiquing the traditional modern subject on philosophical grounds alone, Stawarska indicates how part of the problem is both the isolation of the solitary ego in philosophy and the method of philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. This book is highly recommended for a new tradition, that of multidisciplinary dialogical phenomenology.”

Journal of Consciousness Studies

Classical phenomenology has suffered from an individualist bias and a neglect of the communicative structure of experience, especially the phenomenological importance of the addressee, the inseparability of I and You, and the nature of the alternation between them. Beata Stawarska remedies this neglect by bringing relevant contributions from cognate empirical disciplines—such as sociolinguistics and developmental psychology, as well as the dialogic tradition in philosophy—to bear on phenomenological inquiry. Taken together, these contributions substantiate an alternative view of primary I-You connectedness and help foreground the dialogic dimension of both prediscursive and discursive experience. Between You and I suggests that phenomenology is best practiced in a dialogical engagement with other disciplines.

Beata Stawarska is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. She had published on issues of social relatedness and language in the fields of classical and feminist phenomenology, as well as philosophical psychology.