ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Edmund Husserl's method of 'eidetic variation'. The 'kaleidoscope' is the image introduced by Edmund Husserl in his Freiburg lectures Einleitung in die Philosophie to account for the possibility of phantasy-variation. Perception is a process in which individuality is signaled precisely by the developing horizon of possible specifications of the object, while each specification that we grasp already represents an identifiable object. What is properly individual is only that which cannot appear as self-identical more than once, and this means that at the level of perceptual experience the individual is manifest through the dimension of sensuous transcendence. According to McDowell, what grants the possibility of a parallelism between empirical experience and perceptual judgment is the fact that the unity of apperception and its conceptual workings is operative in both. The uniform character of both sorts of activities both are conceptually informed is that which makes it possible that empirical experience be expressed in perceptual judgments.
