Phaedo: a Ghost Story.

In one of the most famous essays in the history of film theory, André Bazin writes, "One no longer believes in the ontological identity of the model and its portrait, but we acknowledge that the latter helps us to recollect the former, and thus, to save it from a second spiritual death" (Bazin 1958: 10). This essay interprets Plato's Phaedo as centrally concerned with the problem of how to understand the Sôcratikoi logoi as aids to the recollection of Socrates' philosophic practice, and it takes its inspiration from reflections in contemporary film theory on the relation between film and the ghostly or spectral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]