DIALOGIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF PAIN EXPERIENCE SAULIUS GENIUSAS THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PAIN. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2020 ISBN 978-0-8214-2403-2

The review focuses on Saulius Geniusas’ book, The Phenomenology of Pain. In this study, Geniusas develops his own systematic phenomenology of the experience of pain, based primarily on the conceptual resources of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In doing so, the philosopher formulates and successfully implements original methodological principles of “dialogical phenomenology.” Such a phenomenology consists of, on the one hand, strict phenomenological analysis of pain based on the methods of epoché, phenomenological reduction and eidetic variation, and on the other hand, of actual and partly polemical inclusion of phenomenological point of view in the ongoing discussion of pain in the social and biological sciences. The author manages to do this by supplementing his eidetic analysis of the essence of pain experience with the method of “factual variations” and by appealing to the analytical optics of Husserl’s late genetic phenomenology. This way the book reflects—on strictly phenomenological grounds—numerous findings from the sociology and biology of pain. The book relies on the tradition of phenomenological research, offers a conceptual reconstruction of the key dispute about pain that took place in this tradition (between Franz Brentano and Carl Stump) and, in its turn, grounds the positive sciences of pain in the direct evidence of experience itself.

Exploring different intersubjective structures in relation to dialogue

In this paper, I examine some of the presuppositions that underpin the practice and interpretation of multi-person dialogue – that is, in contexts involving more than two interlocutors – with particular thought for the university seminar. I outline the ‘dialogical phenomenology’ of Beata Stawarska as useful on this count; however, I argue that Stawarska’s account is steeped in a philosophical ‘dyadic paradigm’ which has limiting consequences for practitioners of dialogue looking to understand the nature of dialogue in a group context. Against this paradigm, I argue that there are many varieties of intersubjectivity that have not been widely discussed, including we-you, we-yous, I-yous and we-they intersubjective structures. I will look further at how an understanding of these structures is valuable for dialogue within educational praxes and for the Humanities more broadly.