MASDEU, Baltasar. - Jesuit, Neoscholastic philosopher, born in Palermo on 7 May 1741, died in Palma de Mallorca on 31 Dec. 1820. After a period of teaching literature at the Colegio de Nobles in Barcelona, he was deported, following Charles III’s decree against the Jesuits, to Italy (1768), where he remained even after the suppression of the Order. He first resided in Ferrara and Ravenna; then, as spiritual director of the diocesan seminary, in Faenza; from 1799 onward, as professor of philosophy, in Piacenza at the Collegio di S. Pietro and finally in Cremona at the seminary, after the Jesuits were expelled from Piacenza. He returned to the Order shortly after its restoration (1814) and took up the chair of philosophy at the Collegio Montessori in Palma de Mallorca.
Trained in the school of Cervera (Catalonia), where a movement for the restoration of Scholasticism had begun as early as 1750, Masdeu exerted a significant influence, especially on Buzetti, in Piacenza and Cremona for the renewal of Italian Scholastic and Thomist philosophy. He composed a complete course in philosophy, of which only the *Ethica seu moralis philosophiae epitome* was published (2 vols., Piacenza 1805); the remaining parts—Dialectics, Logic, Ontology, Theodicy, Cosmology, Psychology—remained in manuscript in the Biblioteca Provinciale of Palma de Mallorca (cf. list and description in M. Battilori, op. cit. in bibl., pp. 5-32).