MASDEU, BALTASAR. - Jesuit, neo-scholastic philosopher, b. in Palermo on 7 May 1741, d. in Palma di Maiorca on 31 Dec. 1820. After a period of teaching literature at the Collegio dei nobili in Barcellona, he was deported to Italy (1768), following the decree of Carlo III against the Jesuits, where he remained even after the suppression of the Order. He lived first in Ferrara and Ravenna; then, as spiritual director of the diocesan Seminary, in Faenza; subsequently, from 1799, as professor of philosophy, in Piacenza at the Collegio di S. Pietro, and finally in Cremona, at the Seminary, after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Piacenza. He re-entered the Order shortly after its restoration (1814), and took the chair of philosophy at the Collegio Montession in Palma di Maiorca.
Trained at the school of Cervera (Catalogna), where a movement for the restoration of scholasticism had begun as early as 1750, M. exercised an effective influence in Piacenza and Cremona, especially upon Buzzetti, for the renewal of Italian scholastic and Thomistic philosophy. He wrote a course of philosophy, of which, however, only the Ethicae seu moralis philosophiae epitome (2 vols., Piacenza 1805) was published; while the other parts—Dialettica, Logica, Ontologia, Teodicea, Cosmologia, Psicologia—remained in manuscript in the Biblioteca provinciale of Palma di Maiorca (cf. list and description in M. Batllori, op. cit. in the bibliography, pp. 5-32).