social philosophy in Britain and America . by Dorothy Emmet . I should like to start this talk by asking what is meant by social philosophy ? an unkind critic looking at the programmes of the social philosophy section might suggest it seems to mean any topic of interest bearing on contemporary society ; while in a recent talk to this section the term was used to mean something like a coherent body of thought about society related to a definite social programme . I am prepared to defend the eclectic character of the section &apos;s programme against an exclusively monolithic view of what social philosophy must be ; though I think that these various topics of social interest need to be treated not just descriptively , but in ways which produce criticism and reflection of a reasonably general kind if we are to call them a form of social philosophy . the view that we need a social philosophy related to a social purpose was developed by contrasting our malaise and lack of direction in this country with the conviction and sense of direction seen in communist countries . but I am not at all sure that the answer is that we should produce something else of the same kind in democratic terms . my difficulty about the notion of social purpose is that if we think of this in the singular and particularize , it would mean that the whole national effort would have to be directed to a gigantic programme . this may be possible in wartime , and it may be possible when a collective economy is being built up as in the communist countries , but does it not suggest a great deal more regimenting and pressure than we believe right in democratic countries ? on the other hand , if we do not use the term to mean a single specific programme , the notion of social purpose turns into something we put vaguely in phrases such as achieving social justice , or persons in community , or , even more vaguely , living the good life . I do not want to say that these notions are just vacuous , but I do not think they can be cashed in terms of a single programme , nor that we are all likely to agree on the phrase we should use , nor that we should all be thinking about it most of the time . if we are asked what the policy of this country should be directed towards , we could say , e.g , to the maintenance of world peace ; to working towards a multi-racial commonwealth ; to educational expansion at various levels ; to maintaining the social services ; and presumably to maintaining the level of production to pay for all this . in this way , we may hope to maintain a tolerable way of living together , so that people can pursue a number of purposes they themselves think worth while in their own work and private lives . but does this add up to a social philosophy in the comprehensive sense geared to a single social purpose ? and if not , is this a sign that we are growing up , or is it due to the difficulty of seeing general ideas relevant to this pragmatic stage of our development ? I turn now to America , where I think the notion of social philosophy is more congenial , perhaps because the Americans may be a more ideological nation than we are . Edward Shils and Daniel Bell both write about the end of ideology , but not very convincingly . what they really mean is the end of the appeal of communist ideas to the intellectuals . I believe that we can still see pervasive influences of certain kinds of ideology in American thinking . first of all there is the liberal individualism of the founding fathers . I found it genuinely moving to stand inside the Lincoln monument in Washington and read the passages from the Gettysburg address on the wall , fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation , conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal . of course one can be cynical about it , and instance discrimination against all sorts of people . but nevertheless it is there to disturb consciences , and it is an ideology which found its way into the constitution , and so can give a backing of legitimacy to people struggling against certain kinds of discrimination , for instance in the struggle over integration in the southern states . I was interested to find recently , in teaching an undergraduate course in political theory in an American university , how much Locke seemed to them to talk obvious sense . I doubt whether this would be true of our students here . but these American undergraduates talked easily about natural rights , and produced Lockean notions of checks and balances and aversion to strong government as self-evidently sensible . I think this political ideology produces a real problem for thinking realistically about their contemporary political philosophy . for it does not deal adequately with the very great power of the President , especially in foreign relations , and with all the trends making for strong government at the centre . in spite of the official political philosophy of checks and balances we also hear demands for a strong lead from the President , and this demand is all the more apparent when the administration is not giving it , as was thought to be the case with the recent Eisenhower administration . so there seems to be a need to re-think the official political philosophy in terms of the realities of power and the demands for strong government . a second dominant ideology is the Dewey philosophy of experimental problem-solving . this assumed a union of intelligence and goodwill , so that democratic social ends could be taken for granted and attention concentrated on means of achieving them . this was an explicit pragmatic democratic philosophy of an older generation , but now it is taking the form of a positivist political science which holds that ends can not be rationally discussed , while scientific ingenuity can be devoted to working out efficient means of getting whatever it is that you happen to want . this is the ideological background of a good deal of their political sociology . the muck-raking investigations of an older generation have been replaced by studies of the dynamics of pressure groups . there are also writings about politics as a science of power , taking for granted that people want power and trying to show how they manipulate beliefs and symbols in order to get it . C Wright Mills writes best sellers partly in this vein , but also with a note of passionate idealism running through them . I find it difficult to see just how the idealism and the tough power politics note are brought together in his thinking . Reinhold Niebuhr continues his well-known attack on complacencies over problems of power , and on the simplifications both of cynicism and idealism . he seems to me to be gaining in stature all the time and to have become a political analyst of practical importance . turning from political to social criticism , there is the extensive literature on pressures to conformity , of which Whyte &apos;s organization man and Reisman &apos;s lonely crowd are the best-known examples . these illustrate how quickly a trend of criticism can catch on . people , at any rate those represented by the more intellectual weeklies and by conversation in eastern cities , are getting highly sophisticated about this notion of conformity , and they crack jokes about peer groups . but I do not think that we know the answer to the problem underneath this literature , namely , the distinction between the kinds of pressures that are necessary and right if people are to learn to live together and get trained to do things well , and the kinds of pressures which make people conventional and afraid of adventuring . the notion that one can live without need for any kind of conformity is shown up even by the beats , who set out to be non-conformist , and then find themselves becoming a fashion , pursued by social success , and even get opportunities to read their poetry at $300 a time . and of course they also establish their own particular conventions of unconventionality . these seem to me to be some of the trends in what one might call social philosophy in a rather vague sense in contemporary America . how does the new Kennedy administration look against this background ? it may well catch a national mood which is prepared for tough-minded energy along with idealism . I heard Professor J K Galbraith address a campaign meeting of students of Columbia University , in which he said that the important distinction of outlook as he saw it nowadays was not so much between liberals and conservatives as between the complacent and the concerned . people who call themselves liberals or conservatives could be found on both sides . he then gave a masterly satire of the last administration as examples of the complacent , and he looked forward to Kennedy and those associated with him as people who would be concerned in the sense of deeply and compassionately aware that there are problems , international , social and domestic , which need to be met . perhaps this does not add up to a social philosophy . but I could not help being impressed in America by the energy and interest in social ideas . the appeal of a person like Galbraith himself is symptomatic . a book like his the affluent society , for all the criticisms that economists and others can make of it , is perhaps more influential than anything of the kind which is being written here . do we want intelligently-written books on particular social trends , rather than a monolithic social philosophy ? if we like to call recognizing the need for intelligence and goodwill in achieving tolerable ways of living together a social philosophy , well and good . but this needs to go beyond generalities to particular studies of particular social trends , presented in a readable form . the energy , concern and intelligence to do this kind of thing are more in evidence in America than over here . this does not mean that these fires are not burning over here , but they are damped down . the test whether damped fires are really alight is to see whether they can burn up when poked . but I doubt whether we want them to be burning out in a continual conflagration of propaganda for social ideologies . peaks of medical history . by Lord Cohen of Birkenhead . the history of medicine runs parallel to the history of man . it takes its roots in pre-history when man , coping with hostile forces , felt a primal sympathy for his fellow man and sought to relieve his suffering . since then the practice of medicine has reflected the philosophy of its time though earlier ideas have often tended to persist despite their scientific disproof . though we tend to associate great discoveries in medicine with one man , as I indeed shall often do in this lecture , we must not accept blindly Carlyle &apos;s dictum that history is biography but recognise that many have added bricks to the building before it presents as a completed edifice . the earliest records of medicine date back over 6,000 years . they stem from the valley of the Nile where may yet be seen the royal tomb of Zoser designed by a physician of his reign , Imhotep , who was later deified and associated with the famous temple of Edfu . contemporaneously , or possibly a little later , there developed a great Sumerian civilisation but our records of this are incomplete . yet there are recorded , in the famous code Hammurabi ( 1948-1905 B.C ) , Babylonian laws relating to medical practice . it is however from the Egyptian papyri , especially of Edwin Smith and Ebers found at Thebes and dating from about the sixteenth century B.C that we find the first records of the practice of medicine . these papyri show that the Egyptians shared with the most primitive medical folklore the concept of animism viz that disease is caused by the evil influence of enemy , demon , god or even animal and that this evil spirit might be warded off by amulets , propitiated by sacrifice , and expelled by incantations . 