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A pictural representation of the Allegory of the Cave.

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Plato and the Ancient Greeks (about 428-347 BCE)

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Plato and the Ancient Greeks (about 428-347 BCE)

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Plato’s world view was metaphysically dualistic as he believed that beyond everything in the physical world was a world of pure ideas that was eternal and held the “true essence” of physical objects. This separates the mind from the body. Plato's Allegory of a cave exemplifies the separation of these worlds. Prisoners who have only lived chained in a cave watching shadows on a wall will name the shadows and consider the shadows as real. when one prisoner is released, he gains the knowledge of the real world and adjusts to it, eventually separating the real world from the shadows and reflections. however when he tries to share his knowledge with those in the cave, he is considered a fool. the others, happy in their ignorance, refuse to accept the real world as real

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A picture of Leonardo Davinci, a prominent thinker during the renaissance. 

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Ancient Greek learning and thought were rediscovered after being lost during the Dark Ages and their metaphysical dualistic views re-emerged.

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Descartes continued with the idea of dualism, separating the body and the mind, but created cartesian dualism. He stated that the body was a machine that science could study, while the mind was the realm of the church and could not be studied. This separation between mind and body allowed scientists to study the body without angering the church. This view of the body being a machine applied to all matter in the form of reductionism, which states that the world is a series of objects interacting in a complex machine. Thus complex machines could be broken down into simpler subunits that could be studied. It also stressed a reliance on experimentation and empirical observation to verify hypotheses and predictions.

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Mettrie disagreed with Descartes' dualistic ideas, stating that those ideas made matter inanimate, unable to move on its own. Mettrie stated that matter was living, and its ability to think and act spontaneously was a fundamental property of matter. To Mettrie, living things did not need a non-physical force to think and act for thinking and acting came from the physical makeup of living things.

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Claude Bernard believed that the role of science was to apply the laws of physics and chemistry to physiology. He agreed with Mettrie's monistic views. He stated that living things were like steam engines in the sense that people who did not know how or why a steam engine moved would see one and believe that it is being moved by mysterious forces. however, if a person were to go inside and understand how the train engine works, they would see that it moves on its own due to its internal environment (its steam engine and its components). Living matter works the same way. A living organism gains autonomy through its internal environment.

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Walter Cannon agreed with Bernard's ideas and coined the term homeostasis as a way to describe the maintaining of internal stability through changes in the external environment. Cannon studied areas of the brain that detect internal states and invoke compensatory responses when those states change. he also concerned himself with the impact of psychological stress.

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Hans Selye is considered to be the father of stress research. He was the first to use stress to understand a person's physiological responses to threats. He identified common physiological responses to stress such as smaller thalamus glands and other immune system organs, ulcers in the gastrointestinal tract, and enlarged adrenal glands. his studies also led to the discovery of what Seyle called "General Adaptation syndrome". This process describes how organisms respond and survive in stressful environments. The stages of this process included alarm, resistance, and exhaustion. Through this process, he was able to recognize the long-term and deadly effects of stress.

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Coined the term allostasis which describes the demand maintaining homeostasis has on the body when the stressor has not been removed or neutralized.

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Stellar and McEwen created the idea of the allostatic load, which is the cost of maintaining homeostasis when a stressor remains for a longer period of time, such as years or months.