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Waltraud Ernst ◆ Transgressing epistemic limits?
Knowing a person’s sex – and defining the criteria for it – has been of great fascination since
modernity, especially since the emergence of the empirical human sciences as anatomy, anthropology
at the turn of 1800. Predicting a person’s gender – and defining the criteria to determine it – has
become an increasing concern even today in polymer technologies. There have been also eager and
plentiful attempts to determine a person’s erotic desires and pleasures, practices and relations and
classify them in terms of sexual types or identities. In my paper I will argue with examples from
empirical sciences – that at the end all these attempts have been in vain so far. Sex, gender and
sexuality have been proven as quite limited fields of knowledge even though there have been
major efforts of knowledge production in biology and the social sciences. On the other hand, it
has been argued, that in the same field of knowledge there has been production of ignorance. I will
explore, if the epistemology of ignorance is a useful tool to analyse the narrations of sex, gender and
sexuality brought forward by scientific theories. I will discuss the thesis that the boundaries between
knowledge and ignorance are far less clear, especially when it comes to the epistemic limited field of
sex, gender and sexuality. I will argue that by understanding natural sciences as narrations about the
nature and meaning of gender and erotic relations, we can discuss clearer their epistemic limits. I
will show that sex, gender and sexuality are fields were borders are crossed and boundaries are transgressed
always again – by ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Transgressing epistemic limits, what science produces
to determine as erotic desires and pleasures, practices and relations, might best be understood as
narrations of a fascinating but never fully understandable sites of life, which escape logical structuring
and causal explanation.◆
Mahdi Esfahani ◆ Thinking about boundaries and self-knowledge
What are conditions of possibility of thinking about boundaries? When we are speaking of boundaries,
it means we know both side of them, without such a presupposition we can’t know boundaries
and can’t speak meaningfully about them. This “knowledge of both sides” is the most important
epistemological condition of possibility of thinking about boundaries. This article will try to analyze
this epistemological condition and its anthropological (or ontological) conditions; it means it will
try to explain the role of human existence and its specialties in this context and through it, attempts
to disclose key function of thinking about boundaries for self-knowledge which is core of Socrates
definition of philosophy. Detailed important steps are as follow: 1. To know boundary is “knowing
it’s both sides” 1.1. About definition of definition (etymological consideration) 1.2. Aristotle and
knowing boundaries 1.3. Wittgenstein and knowing boundaries (Also hints about pseudo Dionysius
Areopagite and Hegel) 1.4. Argumentation 2. World and its Boundaries 2.1. Dasein as “in-der-Weltsein”
2.2. “Zuhandenheit” as explanation of “being situation” of everything which is in world of „inder-Welt-sein“
2.3. Boundaries of “in-der-Welt-sein” 3. Conditions of possibility of knowing both
sides of boundary 3.1. Human being as Dasein 3.2. “Dasein” is openness to “Sein”. “Sein” encompass
all “seinden”.It means: Dasein (through its openness) potentially can be expanded to all “seinden”
and encompass them. 3.3. Thinking about boundaries and knowing them actualize this potentiality
4. Thinking about boundaries as expansion of itself 4.1. “Vorhandenheit”, thinking about self, its
boundaries and expansion of world 4.2. “in-der-Welt-sein” as existence (an etymological excurse)
4.3. Self-knowledge as Socratic definition of philosophy 4.4. Thinking about boundaries and selfknowledge.◆
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