acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

The purpose of this study is to provide a detailed exposition of Heidegger's conception of philosophy as 'destruction [Destruktion].' My thesis is that the ultimate motivation for engaging in this practice of Destruktion is the value of an 'authentic' way of life. That is, 'destruction' is a philosophical practice that aims at cultivating authenticity as a concrete possibility for individual men and women. I argue for this claim by first of all examining the theological sources for Heidegger's notion of 'destruction,' with a particular focus on Luther. Second, I provide a detailed exposition of the development of 'destruction' in Heidegger's work from the 1920's, and of the ideas intimately linked with it In Chapter One, I undertake to clarify Heidegger's philosophical position on the importance of religion and theology not only for Western intellectual history as a whole, but also for his own idiosyncratic philosophical project. In Chapter Two I explore the role that his study of Luther played in the development of Heidegger's conception of philosophy as 'destruction.' In Chapter Three, I lay some necessary groundwork for my later discussion by examining Heidegger's conception of human selfhood. In Chapter Four, I undertake to give a thorough account of Heidegger's conception of an 'inauthentic' way of life. In Chapter Five, I examine Heidegger's views about the way public discourse, particularly intellectual discourse, is oftentimes complicit in an inauthentic way of life. In Chapter Six, I locate Heidegger's conception of authenticity within the tradition of Romantic personalism, and show how he investigates the roots of this tradition in primitive Christianity. In Chapter Seven, I present an explication of Heidegger's conception of an 'authentic life' by focusing on his works before and including Being and Time. Having laid the groundwork for understanding the meaning of 'destruction' in Chapters One through Seven, I begin an explicit examination of the nature of Heidegger's conception of philosophy in Chapter Eight. Chapter Nine is the culmination of my argument, in which I focus on the idea of 'destruction,' and show that it is everywhere linked with Heidegger's ideal of an authentic way of life / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

In recent years, with the improvement of accuracy, density functional theory (DFT) has become a useful tool in the investigation of the electronic structures of atoms, molecules, and solids, due to its high computational efficiency, compared to the traditional wavefunction theory. In this theory, only the exchange-correlation energy as a functional of the electron density has to be approximated. While many density functional approximations for exchange and correlation have been proposed, a chemically accurate and yet universal exchange-correlation functional is still desired. To construct or improve an exchange-correlation functional, the investigation of the existent functionals is helpful. For example, comparison of the approximate exchange-correlation energy density with the exact one is useful for us to identify regions of space in which the approximation works or fails. Unfortunately, the exchange-correlation energy density is not uniquely defined. Though there have existed several definitions for this quantity, the conventionally-defined one is of special importance in DFT, since they are related to the exchange-correlation hole. In this study, (1) we investigated the most fundamental level of the widely-used Colle-Salvetti correlation in chemistry for the uniform electron gas and found that it gave only 25% of the exact correlation energy and not 100% as previously believed in the literature. (2) we derived the asymptotic behavior of the exchange energy density near a nucleus and then built this and other correct behaviors into a new density functional for the exchange energy. (3) we proposed an accurate MGGA-based hydrid exchange-correlation functional by mixing some exact exchange in this functional. This hybrid functional improves or competes with the previously established hybrid functionals in the literature. (4) we proposed a sophisticated hybrid model which predicts the conventional correlation energy density from a correlated wavefunction. This model allows us to compare various density functional approximations for the correlation energy density with the exact conventional correlation energy density in simple systems. (5) starting with the second-order gradient expansion for the exchange hole without integration by parts, we performed the real-space cutoff procedure. The resultant nonempirical EMGGA0x is used to construct the controlled-interpolation EMGGA2x between the slowly-varying density and the iso-orbital region / acase@tulane.edu

Koasati is an American Indian language of the Muskogean family, presently spoken by about three hundred people in rural southwestern Louisiana. The morphological processes of the language are primarily agglutinative, with limited morphophonemic alterations. The verbal system is typified by three major conjugations, defined by the variation in form of the elements cross-referencing the verbal subject. These subject cross-reference markers have variant forms which reference negation as well as person. There is an elaborate set of verbal prefixes and suffixes, which reference numerous notions, such as location, direction, direct object, dative/benefactive object, adverbial concepts, aspect, tense, and source of information. Like other Muskogean languages Koasati has a system of reference indexing, or switch-reference, which consists of verbal suffixes. In addition there is a series of connective words which also have switch-reference functions. The nominal system contains a moderately well-developed case system, with the following cases: nominative, accusative, autonomous, locative, allative, inessive, and vocative. In addition there are article-suffixes which indicate that a noun has been previously mentioned, and which mark tense on the noun, as well as nominal suffixes which serve discourse functions This grammar is an attempt to sketch, in as much detail as possible, the phonology and morphology of the language, as well as to outline its syntax and semantics. In order to provide a description of this complex language with as much clarity as possible, a theoretical orientation has been eschewed, and many examples have been introduced / acase@tulane.edu

This descriptive grammar of the Potosino dialect of Huastec is explicitly designed to make information about the language maximally available to other linguists, of whatever theoretical persuasion. It therefore contains many exhaustive tables of verb, noun, adjective, adverb and particle forms and of the various derivations possible in the language. Over a thousand sentence examples are given, with interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses. The introductory chapter discusses the history of linguistic, ethnohistoric, ethnographic and archaeological research on the Huastec in considerable detail The grammar proper covers the phonology and morphology of the language, with a detailed discussion of morphemic co-occurrence phenomena. The pronominal system, with its many homonymous forms, is explicated at length. Verbs are described in terms of their basic morphology and transitivity changing derivations, derivation of semantically complex stems and derivation from other parts of speech. Noun morphology and noun derivation are fully described. Noun compounds are treated extensively, as is the complex problem of noun possession classes. Subsequent chapters deal with clitics, plurality, numbers, and time. Root and derived adjectives are covered at some length. The following chapter deals with particles such as interjections, interrogatives, prepositions, and other minor word classes and with locative, temporal, manner, degree, and modal adverbs The final two chapters are concerned with the syntax of the language, considering phrases and simple sentences and elaborations of these, the problem of word order, and conjoined and complex sentences. Throughout, the discussion is focussed on the ergative morphology and syntax of this Mayan language. A lengthy Huastec text is appended with morpheme-by-morpheme and free translation / acase@tulane.edu