discrimen

Noun

discrimen (plural discrimina or discrimens)

1. 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...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
2. 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...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...1998, Jan Patočka, James Dodd, Body, Community, Language, World, →ISBN, page 133
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
   • 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...2003, George Hugo Tucker, Homo Viator, →ISBN
4. 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...1995, James B. Tubbs Jr, Christian Theology and Medical Ethics: Four Contemporary Approaches, →ISBN
   • 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