This research clarified how Schelling's reading of Aristotle is related to the contemporary French phenomenology of, among others, Levinas. More precisely, by employing Schelling’s interpretation of Aristotle in the introduction to Philosophy of Revelation, in which Schelling develops his own notion of “empiricism”, the research showed how this concept of empiricism is related to Levinas’s phenomenology and how this relationship makes this a novel rendering of French phenomenology. 

    To this aim, the investigation took the following steps: First, it began by clarifying Plato’s basic thoughts on “participation” (methexis), that of ideas shared by sensible things, based on Plato's texts, including the Meno, Phædo, Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus. Second, by following Schelling's interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, this study elucidated Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s concept of “participation” as having an analogous structure to Kant's critique of ontotheology. Next, it demonstrated how Schelling's “metaphysical empiricism” differs from what he calls the “empiricism” of Aristotle. Finally, by illuminating how Levinas's phenomenology shares the structure of “metaphysical empiricism”, this research showed that contemporary French phenomenology, while differing from Husserlian phenomenology qua eidetics, also avoids returning to English empiricism.