Emeritus Appointment
wuzgalis@oregonstate.edu

Credentials: 
Ph.D in Philosophy from Stanford University
MA in Asian Studies from California State University at Long Beach
BA in Classics from the University of California, Irvine

Profile Field Tabs

At OSU
Headquarters: 
OSU Main Campus
Courses Taught: 

PHL 251 Knowers, Knowing and the Known

PHL 302 History of Western Philosophy

PHL 443 World Views and Environmental Values

PHL 451 Knowledge and Reality

Research/Career Interests: 

Background

William Uzgalis is a Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University where he has taught since 1981.   His research focuses mainly on a variety of issues in early modern philosophy and philosophy of mind.

Uzgalis has also 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 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 Committee on Computers and Philosophy. He helped organize the first Computers and Philosophy Conference at OSU (CAP@OSU) held on Jan. 18-20, 2001 and served as its co-director and served as the conference director for the last CAP conference held at OSU in August 2005. 

Since its inception in 1992, Uzgalis has also been one of the moving forces in the continuing growth of the OSU Philosophy Departments IDEAS MATTER lecture series. Uzgalis has organized the IDEAS MATTER lecture series six times including the first of the series on the “Legacy of Columbus” in 1992.

Select Publications

 The Correspondence of Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins, 1707-08  

The Correspondence of Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins, 1707-08

Broadview Press
(October 21, 2011)

Locke's 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding': A Reader's Guide

Continuum (June 9, 2007)

Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding
   

Articles and Chapters

Professor Uzgalis has also published a number of papers on aspects of the philosophy of John Locke.  These papers include: "The Anti-Essential Locke and Natural Kinds" in the History of Philosophy Quarterly and "The Same Tyrannical Principle: The Lockean Legacy on Slavery" in T. Lott ed. Subjugation and Bondage.  Uzgalis presented “Paidea and Identity: Meditations on Hobbes and Locke” at the 20th World Congress of Philosophy in Boston in August 1998 and a John Locke article (2001, 2007) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  "An Inconsistency not to be Excused: On Locke and Racism" is in a volume edited by Tommy Lott and Julie Ward and titled Traditional Philosophy and Race published by Routledge (December 2001).

Other publications in the area of early modern philosophy include the Anthony Collins article (2003) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and “Berkeley and the Western Course of Empire: On Racism and Ethnocentrism” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy edited by Andrew Valls and published by Cornell University Press in 2005.  He recently published a review of The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger, Ian Hunter (eds.) in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (July 17, 2007) and an article on Pascal in the Literary Encyclopedia.

In terms of research in the area of computers and philosophy, Uzgalis wrote a paper entitled “Adaptable Robots” with Gene Korienek published both in Metaphilosophy (2002) and a subsequent book titled Cyberphilosophy (2003). He organized a year long IDEAS MATTER lecture series on “Minds, Animals and Machines” in which he both served as the chief organizer and gave several of the lectures.  He interviewed Daniel Dennett for a special edition of Minds and Machines published in 2006 after Dennett received the Barwise prize for life-time achievements in the area of computing and philosophy from the American Philosophical Association.