The regular meeting of the Society for 2003 was held at St. Olaf, Northfeild.  The President, Wade Savage, opened the meeting.  He thanked the Vice President and Program Chair, Vicky Harper, for organizing the conference.  He next thanked the Secretary/Treasurer John Kronen, and said he would like to thank St. Olaf himself, but regretted that that was not possible since the Saint was not present at the meeting of the Society!  Dr. Savage next made a few announcements bearing on the appropriate disposal of food and metal cans.  Corlis Swain, of St. Olaf, announced the upcoming Malcolm Lectures hosted by the St. Olaf philosophy department and concerned with various moral aspects of forgiveness.  Vicky Harper announced a special tour of an historic library on the St. Olaf campus (I cannot spell the name of the august place).

    Next the President asked the Secretary to read the minutes of the 2002 meeting.  After he did so he noted that there are still some problems with the member list.  There are actually two lists, a list the Secretary inherited from the previous Secretary, Michael Degnan, which he has been trying to keep up to date over the years, and another list Kate Gill assembled when the Secretary was in Paris for a semester.  The old list is arranged by school, and has a concluding section of unaffiliated philosophers; the new list is arranged in alphabetical order.  Both lists are on the Society's Web page, but both are plagued with errors and neither is complete.  After some discussion about what to do with the lists the secretary agreed he would first compare the two lists and make any changes to the old list necessary in light of the information in the new list.  He would then send the corrected list around to all department chairs by email and ask them to make any corrections or emendations to it.  The Secretary said that he could do this himself and did not need to have the Society hire an assistant worker to do so.  Doug Lewis was incredulous that the Secretary would actually accomplish this task any time during his life, let alone in time for next year's meeting.  The Secretary assured Dr. Lewis he would accomplish this task.  Dr. Lewis said he would hold the Secretary to this, under threat of replacing him with a more responsible and capable secretary.

    The next item of business concerned the host for the 2004 regular meeting of the Society.  Two schools contacted Dr. Savage just the night before to say that they would be willing to host the 2004 meeting, to wit, Mankato State University and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul.  After some discussion it was decided that Mankato State would host the 2004 meeting, and that Craig Materise would be the the Vice President for next year.  Vicky Harper, thereby ascended to the position of President, and John Kronen was re-elected as Secretary (mainly because no one else wanted this rather thankless and boring position and not because of any particular virtue possessed by the Secretary).

    The next item of business was the determination of who should host the 2004 student conference.  After a suggestion by Doug Lewis  St. Olaf volunteered to host the 2004 student conference.  After this the next order of business was the announcement of new members: Peter Hanks from the U of M Twin Cities;  John Bruss from St. Olaf; Sean McAleer from Wisconsin, Eu Claire; Greg Peterson from South Dakota State;  Michelle Speidel from Mankato, and Kyle Swan from the U of M. Duluth..

    After this the President opened up the floor for announcements from members.  David Cole said that Doc Mayo would like people to contact him if they would like to give a colloquium in the Spring at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.  Ronald Glass, of the University of Wisconsin, said he thought it a shame that the technology schools acquire for distance education is not used to broadcast philosophical presentations from one school which has members in the society to others that do.  Dr. Glass believes it might help students smitten with philosophy that there are other people "like them" elsewhere in the universe.  He suggested that the University of Minnesota Twin Cities look into this possibility.

After this the meeting was adjourned.

John Kronen
Secretary/Treasurer