The Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) is a philosophical

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 organization

Organization

An organization is a social group which distributes tasks for a collective goal. The word itself is derived from the Greek word organon, itself derived from the better-known word ergon - as we know `organ` - and it means a compartment for a particular job.There are a variety of legal types of...

 founded in 2002 at the Center for Caribbean Thought at the University of the West Indies

University of the West Indies

The University of the West Indies , is an autonomous regional institution supported by and serving 17 English-speaking countries and territories in the Caribbean: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Dominica,...

, in Mona, Jamaica

Mona, Jamaica

Mona is a neighbourhood in southeastern Saint Andrew Parish, approximately five miles from Kingston, Jamaica. A former sugar plantation, it is the site of a reservoir serving the city of Kingston and of the main campus of the University of the West Indies...

. The founding members were George Belle, B. Anthony Bogues, Patrick Goodin, Lewis Gordon

Lewis Gordon

Lewis Ricardo Gordon is an American philosopher who works in the areas of Africana philosophy, philosophy of human and life sciences, phenomenology, philosophy of existence, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics,...

, Clevis Headley, Paget Henry, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Charles Mills, and Supriya Nair. The association promotes the view that philosophy is the "rigorous theoretical reflection about fundamental problems faced by humanity", and that Caribbean philosophy in particular should be seen as "a transdisciplinary form of interrogation informed by scholarly knowledges as well as by practices and artistic expressions that elucidate fundamental questions that emerge in contexts of “discovery,” conquest, racial, gender, and sexual domination, genocide, dependency, and exploitation as well as freedom, emancipation, and decolonization."

The organization now numbers over one hundred and fifty members primarily from Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

, the Caribbean

Caribbean

The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...

, Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

, the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, and Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. The motto of the Association is Shifting the Geography of Reason which reflects its commitment with epistemic decolonization.

The organization sponsors an annual meeting and offers prizes for work that furthers the decolonization and liberation of mankind. The CPA has awarded the Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon was a Martiniquo-Algerian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism...

 Prize to Enrique Dussel

Enrique Dussel

Enrique Domingo Dussel Ambrosini is an Argentine-Mexican writer and philosopher.-Biography:...

, Walter Mignolo

Walter Mignolo

Walter D. Mignolo is an Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, made up over a dozen new words, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the...

, Nigel Gibson

Nigel Gibson

Nigel Gibson is an activist, a scholar specializing in philosophy and a noted author. He was born in London and was an active militant in the 1984 -1985 Miners' Strike. While in London he also met South African exiles from the Black Consciousness Movement and, in conversation with the exiles,...

 and Berghahn Books

Berg Publishers

Berg Publishers is an academic publishing company based in Oxford, England that was founded in 1983 by Marion Berghahn. Berg publishes monographs, textbooks and reference works as well as journals. Concentrations are fashion, design, anthropology, history and cultural studies...

.