discrimen

plural discrimina · plural discrimens

1. biologyA visible dividing line where two structures come together.

   In a number of forms the discrimen appears to bifurcate at its anterior end, as well seen in Odontosphex.

   1998, Michael Andrew Prentice, The Comparative Morphology and Phylogeny of Apoid Wasps (Hymenoptera: Apoidea), page 420

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   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.

   1944, Charles Duncan Michener, Comparative external morphology, phylogeny, and a classification of the bees (Hymenoptera), page 173

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

   1960, Fred A. Urquhart, The monarch butterfly, page 227

   The eusternum may be reduced to form a tiny furcasternum (= to the portion sometimes called the sternellum) or an internal cryptosternum indicated externally by a single median, longitudinal line called the discrimen.

   2005, David Grimaldi, Michael S. Engel, Evolution of the Insects, →ISBN, page 121

2. A distinction, particularity, or distinguishing feature.

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   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does not involve the destruction of every or any discrimen, all discrimina still exist; in Nothing we have simply withdrawn into indefiniteness.

   1865, James Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel

   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.

   1998, Jan Patočka, James Dodd, Body, Community, Language, World, →ISBN, page 133

   This stopping point is imposed by an authority: the traditional idea of philosophy (which Heidegger will later name "metaphysics"). Related to the discrimens of the phenomenological — to consider not the phenomena, but the "mode of their exposition [Art ihrer Aufiveisung] " — one must therefore conclude — as violent as the paradox may seem — that Husserl's phenomenology remains unphenomenological: "In the basic task of determining its ownmost field, therefore, phenomenology is unphenomenological [unphänomenologisch]! — that is to say, phenomenological only in intention [vermeintlich phänomenologisch]!

   1998, Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, →ISBN

3. 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.

   1992, Jamie Masters, Poetry and Civil War in Lucan's Bellum Civile, →ISBN, page 64

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   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.

   2003, George Hugo Tucker, Homo Viator, →ISBN

4. lifestyleA pattern or organizing principle that forms the basis of moral 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.

   2000, Cleophus James LaRue, The Heart of Black Preaching, →ISBN, page 18

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   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.

   1995, James B. Tubbs Jr, Christian Theology and Medical Ethics: Four Contemporary Approaches, →ISBN

   And if we were to link this discrimen to Balthasar's synoptic judgment about what Christianity is all about, then it would be associated with humanity's participation in God as that is realized in God's incarnation in the person Jesus Christ. I do not wish to imply that these two discrimens are the only two with which Balthasar operated.

   2003, William Thomas Dickens, Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics, →ISBN

   But if discrimen is a cardinal virtue of adulthood, the tenets of infantilism work against it. Discrimen requires right judgement; but the idea of something, even judgment, being 'right', is in profound conflict with individualism (which says I can only claim my judgement as being right for me).

   2012, Michael Bywater, Big Babies: Or: Why Can't We Just Grow Up?, →ISBN