Juan Caramuel’s Trismegistus Against the Background of the Post-Tridentine Moral Theology

The thesis deals with the work by Juan Caramuel-y-Lobkowitz, the 17th century Spanish polymath, ecclesiastic, and philosopher. From the richest Caramuel’s legacy we have chosen for the present research his last work, Trismegistus theologicus (1679), in which he had focused on the ethical potential of rhetorical expression. Caramuel was interested in different ways of expression with words or gestures, and particularly in the possibility to express oneself by hidden or sublimated techniques. The main theme of Trismegistus is a rhetorical technique called restrictio (restriction, reservation). The work offers a review of the history of the term restrictio, its role in the 16th – 17th c. Catholic moral theology and its place in the debates regarding probabilism, as this term takes the key place in Caramuel’s moral theology. The thesis will also consider the Caramuel’s treatise against the backgound of the early modern discussion on the interactions between moral philosophy and rhetoric, theories of arbitrary motion and conatus, and the post-Cartesian approaches to the mind-body problem.