emancipation

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the complicated crises that traces back to nearly a century ago. It caused severe challenges and brought about disastrous consequences both for the Middle East region and the conflicting parties. Numerous attempts have taken place so far by different states, organizations and individuals to establish a lasting and comprehensive peace in this conflict, but given the intransigence positions of the conflicting parties, the attempts were futile and still there is no light at the end of this tunnel. The limitations of the realistic viewpoint that dominates the conflict and considers its signs rather than its root causes, made us tackle the issue through a proper, more appropriate approach.. To us, critical studies, particularly the emancipation approach which goes beyond the realistic limitations, deliberates the contemporary and historical conditions together with its nature and tries to remove situations leading to the conflict is a more viable strategy to achieve a lasting peace.

In this essay, I want to address two main aspects of the arguably central topic of Kant's treatise on Enlightenment, namely maturity: these concern the notion of the freedom of thought (Section I) and the idea of emancipation that is conveyed by maturity, the fact that it involves a process of growing up to become a citizen (Section II). Freedom of thought denotes the idea of self-agency which all human beings possess in principle whereas emancipation points to the fact that maturity is something that is not a matter of course, neither in individual cases nor for society at large. Maturity is not a natural disposition that one either possesses or not but must be developed. This means that not all human beings are de facto mature always, everywhere and all of the time. That this situation is not something that is in principle unalterable can be demonstrated by way of assessing Kant's apparent views on women's presumable minority 'according to sex'.