ROBERTO ARDIGO. - Philosopher, born in Casteldidone (Cremona) in 1828 to a modest family, died by suicide in Mantua in 1920. He completed his studies with the aid of others, which led him to the priesthood in 1851. He became a canon of Mantua in 1863 but was suspended *a divinis* in 1869 for his philosophical study of Pietro Pomponazzi. In 1871, following his new work *La psicologia come scienza positiva*, he relinquished his clerical habit and continued teaching philosophy at the Mantua lyceum until 1881, when he was appointed to the university chair in Padua, where he remained until 1909.
Of irreproachable moral conduct, he devoted himself to his preferred studies and did not remain indifferent to his reputation as the leader of Italian positivism and a symbol of opposition to any authority that seemed to constrain absolute freedom of thought. To the point that, much to his own distress, his name remained inextricably linked to the most vigorous anticlericalism. A. expounded his philosophical thought, oriented toward the positivist research of the English and French (Spencer and Comte), whose influence he underwent, and toward the advances of scientific progress, in numerous volumes addressing every topic then under discussion, from psychology to cosmology and sociology. Yet the epistemological and methodological foundations of his system rest upon the affirmed necessity of fully applying the method of the natural sciences to philosophy; upon the principle of the naturalness of every fact; upon the reducibility of the essence of the self to mere sensory phenomenon («everything is sensation and grouping of sensations, and nothing more»), and this, like its psychic manifestations, to mere rhythms of energetic wave lengths, based solely on physiological grounds.
Regarding evolutionism, he developed more than anything the concept of the process from the indistinct to the distinct; in ethics and sociology, he highlighted above all the formative function of moral qualities by society, characterized by destructiveness and through suggestion, example, habit, while religion was also reduced to these elements. In this field, indeed, he defended several errors: he affirmed the dogma of creation; that spirit and matter, certainly coexisting, derive from a prior indistinctness; that Providence is absurd, as is divine intervention in the governance of the world. For this reason, three of his works were placed on the Index: *Pietro Pomponazzi* (decr. 1869); *La psicologia come scienza positiva* (decr. 1872); *La formazione naturale nel fatto del sistema solare* (decr. 1879). He revived the concept of natural formation in education, on whose basis skills and habits are developed into art and character through scientifically methodical exercise, from the simple to the complex, with didactic anticipations and objective intuitions. Of his entire system, the principle of experimental methodology survives, which, although largely confined by A. himself to the framework of the natural sciences, was not unfruitful even outside the scope of his school, in the development of philosophical thought, soon almost submerged by the encroaching idealism.
Studies: M. Liberatore, in *La Civiltà Cattolica*, 7th series, 6 (1869, 1); pp. 609 ff.; F. Berardinelli, ibid., 8th series, 3 (1871, 11), pp. 201-11; G. Marchesini, *La vita e il pensiero di R. A.*, Milan 1907; G. Zamboni, *Il valore scientifico del positivismo di R. A. e della sua conversione*, Verona 1921; G. Marchesini, *La vita e il pensiero di R. A.*, Verona 1921; G. Marchesini, *La vita e il pensiero di R. A.*, Verona 1921; A. F. Amario, *A. Brescia* 1947.