Rumour of the Hidden King: Irad Kimhi

This is just a short note of a kind of introduction, but not to me. I am not very familiar with academic blogs, though I know they exist. The point here is just to say a few words about Irad Kimhi. Kimhi is an Israeli philosopher who had taught in both the United States and Israel. In the mid-1990's he was an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at Yale. He has guest-taught courses on a couple of occasions for the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. As I understand it, his regular gig is to teach courses in Tel Aviv in Israel. His name and reputation are well known among a fairly small group of cognoscenti, including friends, colleagues and former students (like myself). He has a kind of magical reputation to him, unique as far as I know in the academic world: He has not to my knowledge published a book and I don't know that he has published even any articles, but several of his draft manuscripts circulate privately among ravenous devotees of his thought. When he taught courses at the U of C this past Autumn and Winter, established, famous professors sat in on the classes and took notes as eagerly as the attendant graduate students. I will do a poor job trying to explain Kimhi's work here, but think I have to say something. His two main teaching and research subjects, nominally distinct, are psychoanalysis and judgment. In the former, he marries the work of Plato, Freud and Lacan. In the latter, he reconciles the work of Aristotle, Frege and Wittgenstein on the philosophy of language. I posted a brainstorm inspired by Kimhi's recent Chicago courses on this site a few months ago on April 8. He is pretty sure that he has solved the Question of Being, as Heidegger used to call it. To be sure, rumours of great minds and similar gurus are often exaggerated or steeped in exhuberant expectation. But a lot of us seriously think that he will turn out to be one of the hidden kings (another trope once used to describe Heidegger) of contemporary philosophy. I have considerable notes from these courses which I might partially post in the future, if it seems like a good idea.