Editorial. Dialogue, Communication and Collaboration: Aspects of Philosophy and Communication
Authors: Barevičiūtė Jovilė 
Published: April 2016

Acting as a usual means of everyday communication and collaboration, dialogue is also a fundamental mode of human presence in the world. It is innate and, therefore, feels organic to people. Nothing but a dialogue determines and defines the inborn human potential of reflexivity, empathy and communitivity. Naturally, it is hardly surprising that as a phenomenon, a dialogue constantly fell within the purview of most prominent European thinkers and throughout different historical epochs, in the spaces of philosophy and communication, it unfolded in a diverse and multidimensional manner. Ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote in the form of dialogue, this way opening the possibility to a reader to learn about the world and the order of things as well as defining a certain relationship between the perceiving subject and the perceivable object. In the early Middle Ages, writings of Saint Augustine encouraged people to immerse into themselves and start a conversation with God, which established a certain living relationship between spaces empirical and transcendental. Much later, towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, who developed the theory of the intentionality of the consciousness, perceived that no living relationship between people is feasible without intersubjectivity. In this case, the communication is conditioned on the focus of at least two subjects on a certain object. This object, in particular, ensures the potential of the meaning, content and the purpose of communication. Another German author Martin Buber treated the dialogue as a phenomenon, in which an individual establishes a personal relationship with the Christian God, and this gives rise to a certain immediacy: a confrontation with the Ruler of the Kingdom of Heaven gives meaning to all the other interpersonal relationships. These are but few different philosophical interpretations of dialogue as a phenomenon. The universe of issues related to dialogue emerges from thinking perspectives of philosophers as well as communication theorists. On the one hand, the perspective of communication trivializes the phenomenon of dialogue, depriving it of its depth and profoundness; and on the other hand, it defines and specifies the concept of dialogue, assigning to it a form or function. This issue of the journal is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenon of dialogue both in the fields of philosophy and communication, inquiring into different contexts of its development. In her article Communication Solutions by Improving Interactive Art Projects, Gintarė Vainalavičiūtė analyses the relationship between visual arts and contemporary technologies, which determines both the rise of the forms of dialogue and non-traditional understanding of works of art. Mindaugas Stoškus contributed an article entitled Disciplines of Political Philosophy and Political Science: Antagonism, Cooperation or Indifference? in which he investigates the relationship between these two disciplines, conditions and problems pertaining to their dialogue, and the particularly intensified dynamics of the dialogue in the fifties of the 20th century. In their article Online Artistic Activism: Case-Study of Hungarian-Romanian Intercultural Communication, Gizela Horváth and Rozália Klára Bakó delve into the interactive relationship between works of art and their perceiver, as these works of art send messages via the social media environment. Moral Perception, Cognition, and Dialogue is an article authored by Vojko Strahovnik, in which he examines the causes for the rise of cases that hinder intercommunication and mutual understanding, such as disagreement, intercultural dialogues, etc. Problems of visual communication and the specificity of visual languages, bringing together subjects into dialogue are discussed by Arto Mutanen in his article Relativity of Visual Communication. Another article entitled Scientific Realism versus Antirealism in Science Education is a contribution by Seungbae Park, in which he attempts to define how the dialogue between teachers and students is possible, as he takes the position stating that the doctrine of scientific realism is much more effective than provided opportunities of scientific antirealism. And finally, Algis Mickūnas, in his article The Different Other and Dialogue, discusses the reasons why members of different communities find it difficult to establish dialogue-based relationships and why in some cases they remain imprisoned in the state of a monologue. This issue of the journal presents a truly wide field of investigations into opportunities and obstacles for communication, interaction and collaboration. It is pleasing to see that representatives of various humanities and social sciences joined the same dialogue. Looking forward to the productive insights in the future, the Editor would like to express her gratitude to the authors of this issue.