The chapter is an intellectual biography of the early Bergson and lays out his immediate reasons for abandoning plans to earn a medical degree after completing his studies in philosophy. In the process, it shows Bergson’s later accounts of the early stages of his intellectual itinerary to at least be tinged by a retrospective illusion: Bergson did not start out as a psychologist-philosopher to become, via an interest in the philosophy of science, a metaphysician. A detailed overview of the institutional and intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century France demonstrates how the separation of disciplines in independent faculties of the French academy put immense pressure on philosophy to legitimate itself. This pressure was felt all the more acutely by those who, like the young Bergson, lacked economic, symbolic, and cultural capital. By abandoning the plan to study medicine, Bergson conformed to the institutional and doctrinal constraints placed on philosophy. This strategy of adaptation proved to be effective not only in the choice of topics he discussed in his dissertation but also in the way he moved toward, appropriated, and recast metaphysics as his career continued.

“Philosophy of life” is currently employed as a synonym or as a hyponym of “vitalism,” “philosophy of nature,” and “biological philosophy,” labeling texts produced in completely different historical, geographic, and disciplinary contexts and bearing only certain family resemblances. The expressions “Philosophie des Lebens” and “Lebensphilosophie” first appeared during the 1770s in the writings of mutually independent, non-academic German authors linked to the Romantic movement, such as Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–1793). Starting from the 1910s, they re-emerged in two essays written respectively by the Neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936) and by the phenomenologist Max Scheler (1874–1928).

4.1 Introduction

1. Article 2 regulates the publication of information at the commencement of arbitral proceedings. It does so in a rather concise manner, as it only consists of one paragraph. From a systematic point of view, Article 2 is the first provision of the UNCITRAL Rules on Transparency in Treaty-based Investor-State Arbitration (the Rules) to deal substantively with the issue of transparency, after the meticulous definition of the scope of application of the Rules provided by Article 1. Articles 2 to 6 establish the transparency obligations introduced by the Rules. Article 2 makes an express reference to Article 8, which is concerned with the repository of published information.

2. Article 2 imposes the first transparency obligation also from a chronological perspective. The temporal reference point for Article 2 is the commencement of the arbitration, i.e., the moment when the Respondent received the notice of arbitration. Article 3(2) of the Arbitration Rules (2010) stipulates: ‘Arbitral proceedings shall be deemed to commence on the date on which the notice of arbitration is received by the respondent’. Consequently, as soon as the arbitration commences, the transparency mechanism of Article 2 is triggered.

3. Article 2 imposes two obligations. The first one is the obligation for the parties to communicate a copy of the notice of arbitration to the repository. The second obligation requires the repository to make available to the public information regarding the name of the disputing parties, the economic sector involved and the treaty under which the claim is being made.