The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate that the Heideggerian conception of authentic human existence is properly understood only when read as paradox. Because the human being is understood by Heidegger as the site of the disclosure of entities, it is, like the work of art, an appropriation of the primal conflict between clearing and concealing that engenders all truth. By showing that the truth-disclosive structure of conflict belonging to the work of art takes-place in the human being as well, it is revealed that to exist authentically is to enter into the confrontation with one's own paradoxical nature: to be human, that is, to care, is to be conflicted. Reading authenticity in this way vindicates the concept from charges of contradiction levied against it in the secondary literature. Just as the primal conflict enters the work of art as strife between 'world' and 'earth,' so too does it enter human 'Dasein' as strife between 'existence' and 'facticity.' Failure to recognize that this tension is essential to human existence leads the phenomenologist to inconsistency, and the individual person to despair. To be fully human is to exact of oneself the courage to endure the realization that what one shall be one is already. Freedom, and therefore, the possibility of joy, comes only in assuming responsibility for a life, and death, that one did not solicit. This is the paradox of authenticity / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

The Flanner Beach Formation was deposited along the Atlantic Coast of North Carolina, during a high stand of sea level about 200,000 years BP. The formation consists of three members in the Neuse River valley: (1) Smith Gut member (new unit), deposited in early transgressive, open bay settings; (2) Arapahoe sand member, deposited in barrier island environments as rate of sea level rise decreased; and (3) Beard Creek member, composed of bay and lagoonal sediments that accumulated in varied estuarine settings landward of the Arapahoe barrier. Time-equivalent deposits along the Pamlico River also consist of three members: (1) Hills Point member (new unit), deposited in restricted lagoonal or river estuary settings; (2) Mauls Point member (new unit), deposited in open lagoonal areas; and (3) an unnamed member resembling the Beard Creek Paleoecologic units identified in the Smith Gut and Beard Creek members included, in ascending stratigraphic order: (1) polyhaline, open bay fossil associations; (2) polyhaline, slightly restricted bay associations; (3) mesohaline, restricted lagoonal associations; (4) polyhaline, open lagoonal associations; and (5) a mesohaline (?), firm-ground association. The sequence of mollusk-dominated associations reflects changes in composition and structure of intergrading, soft-bottom communities that responded to gradual alterations in water circulation patterns, salinity, intensity of seasonal environmental rigor, and to a lesser extent slight changes in bathymetry and substrate properties, during the evolution of a major barrier-lagoon system. This long-period change in benthic communities is an example of gradual community replacement--the substitution of one community of organisms for another in space and time owing to gradual changes in environmental contexts, yielding a sequence of fossil associations each with slightly different paleosynecologic attributes Gradual replacement is dominated by processes of reorganization of species-abundance patterns, with faunal turnover playing a relatively minor role. In rapidly changing environments, turnover is the dominant mechanism of replacement. Reorganization appears to involve the following processes in estuarine benthic communities: (1) changes in numerical importance of superdominant taxa; (2) shifts in rank levels of subdominant taxa; (3) large changes in rank levels of numerically minor taxa; and (4) gradual demotion of certain taxa to lower rank levels through the preserved community sequence. Simple additions and deletions of minor faunal elements also can occur / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu