Department of Philosophy
Oregon State University
Hovland Hall 102C
Corvallis, OR 97331-3902
541-737-5650
William Uzgalis has a B.A. in Classics from the University of California, Irvine, an M.A. in Asian Studies from California State University at Long Beach and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University. Uzgalis came to OSU in 1981 and teaches a wide variety of courses including Introduction to Philosophy, Philosophies of China, Philosophies of India, History of Western Philosophy: From the Renaissance to David Hume, Personal Identity, Locke, Spinoza, seminars in Metaphysics and Comparative Philosophy, The Theory of Knowledge and others.
Uzgalis has published several papers on aspects of the philosophy of John Locke, including "The Anti-Essential Locke and Natural Kinds" and "The Same Tyrannical Principle: The Lockean Legacy on Slavery." Uzgalis presented Paidea and Identity: Meditations on Hobbes and Locke at the 20th World Congress of Philosophy in Boston in August 1998. His most recent publication is the John Locke article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. "An Inconsistency not to be Excused: On Locke and Racism" is to appear in a volume edited by Tommy Lott and Julie Ward and titled Traditional Philosophy and Race to be published by Routledge in December 2001.
Since its inception in 1992, Uzgalis has been one of the moving forces in the continuing growth of the OSU Philosophy Departments IDEAS MATTER lecture series. Also, Uzgalishas been involved in distance education on the web and with computers and philosophy generally for a number of years. He is one of seven authors of QuestWriter -- a software package for managing on line courses. This was the first piece of software copyrighted by Oregon State University. He has served for several years as the Associate Editor of the APA's Computers Use in Philosophy Newsletter and served for three years on the APA's Committe on Computers and Philosophy. As part of that committee, he helped organize the first Computers and Philosophy Conference at OSU (CAP@OSU) held on Jan. 18-20, 2001. This is a sister conference to that held for many years at Carnegie Mellon University. Uzgalis has been involved in a variety of web projects. The newest of these is:
Phl 302 Distance:This is the completly on-line version of Phl 302. It includes a prototype of a multimedia introduction to Descartes which you can view at Descartes.
The History of Western Philosophy from 1492-1776: is a website to support a classroom based version of Phl 302. It contains both material about the era of philosophical discoveries and materials related to the class.