The article presents some peculiarities of Theory of Knowledge Department’s intellectual life in the Institute of Philosophy (from 1977, before – “dialectical materialism”). “Debates on the margins” are doubts and questions on the sides of manuscripts that were in exchange between staff members of the Department before a collective discussion of someone’s work took place. The fragments of archive documents of N.N. Trubnikov and B.I. Pruzhinin (pencil drafts on pages’ margins and backs), that are given here, allow to judge not only on the style of writing and involvement in the text, but also about the topics, that have not lost their actuality: rationality, crisis of culture, syncretic formations in the dynamic of culture. The study of how conceptual disagreements experienced in the existential modus of human attachment, take part in the outputting of what could be called commensurability, the common problem field, has a special importance for us. Inside the Department controversial and even aporical took part in the thinking dynamic, although not all the moments of people and conception interaction could be marked logically. The Department’s space contained various peculiar configurations of personal conceptions (epistemology of “postmodernism”, that was considered either nonexistent, or nonimportant in all other places). The diversity of epistemological approaches and at the same time latent search of possible forms of harmonization between conceptual and human, in the face of all external context turns, makes the Department’s works and its lifeworld an actual object of modern philosophy and history of science.