discrimen

A visible dividing line where two structures come together.

Except for the coxal socket, the most constant landmarks of the subcoxal region are the midventral discrimen, resulting from the meeting of opposite subcoxae whose contiguous margins have been infolded posteriorly to form the sternal apophyses, and the pleural suture extending from the dorsal articulation of the coxa to the pleural wing process.

Mid-ventrally the sternopleurites unite in a suture, the discrimen, whose inflection forms the very high transparent lamella of the discrimen.

A distinction, particularity, or distinguishing feature.

We admit Nothing to exist; Nothing is an intelligible distinction; we talk of thinking Nothing and of perceiving Nothing: in other words, Nothing is the abstraction from every discrimen or particularity. But an abstraction from every discrimen, does not involve the destruction of every or any discrimen, all discrimina still exist; in Nothing we have simply withdrawn into indefiniteness.

That is how human affectivity places us ever before us in this discrimen. The world then addresses us — affectively, in feelings, and at the same time in senses, impressions — in connection with this differentiation. Yet in the case of the animal and the child we also have to do with a world given in perception though there is no such discrimen present.

A crisis or turning point; A situation that changes how the future will unfold.

But civil war creates as many boundaries as it destroys: its keynote is division, and it is itself a discrimen.

Indeed, as we have further suggested, this follows on also, in the eyes of the pilgrim- visitors themselves, from their own earlier moment of discrimen, at the point when the "old man'"s pilgrim-interlocutor had similarly exclaimed "O Hercules" on learning the Sphinx-like nature of the explanation being proffered to them.

A pattern or organizing principle that forms the basis of moral judgements.

Some years ago James Gustafson advanced the thesis that any comprehensive and systematic account of theological ethics must have a central "discrimen" - an organizing perspective, principle, metaphor or analogy around which it is structured. That discrimen must relate in a coherent fashion four "base points": an understanding of God and God's purposes in relation to humans and the rest of creation; an interpretation of the significance of "the world" and human life in it; an interpretation of human moral agency and actionsl and an interpretation of how we ought to make moral choices and judgements.

The discrimen, or pattern, that each theologian eventually chooses is his or her own distinctive construal of the discrimen that guides his or her critical theological judgements.