Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz

Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz was a Spanish Catholic scholastic philosopher, ecclesiastic, mathematician, polyglot and writer, born in Madrid on 23 May 1606 and dead at Vigevano in September 1682. He studied humanities and philosophy at the University of Alcala de Henares, entered the Cistercian Order in 1625 and took a doctorate in theology at Leuven in 1638. His career ran through the Spanish Netherlands, the court of Emperor Ferdinand III in Prague, where he led ecclesiastics in the defence of the city in 1648, and Rome, and he became Bishop of Campagna e Satriano in 1657 and of Vigevano in 1673. He corresponded with Descartes, Gassendi and Athanasius Kircher. Though he often praised Thomas Aquinas, he explicitly denied being a Thomist and refused to join any school, aiming at a renovated Christian philosophy. He was a leading exponent of probabilism in moral theology, which Pascal criticised in the Provincial Letters and which earned him from Alphonsus Liguori the title Prince of the Laxists. He also wrote on logic, metaphysics, mathematics and architecture, with 262 works counted by one bibliographer.