ARDIGÒ, ROBERTO. — Philosopher, born at Casteldidone (Cremona) in 1828 to a modest family, died by suicide at Mantua in 1920. With the aid of financial support, he completed the studies that led him to the priesthood in 1851. Canon of Mantua in 1863, he was suspended a divinis in 1869 for his philosophical study of Pietro Pomponazzi. In 1871, after his new work La psicologia come scienza positiva, he laid aside the clerical habit, continuing to teach philosophy at the Mantua secondary school until, in 1881, he was appointed to the university chair at Padua, where he remained until 1909.
Of irreproachable moral conduct, he devoted himself to his preferred studies, nor did he prove insensitive to the reputation of being the leader of the Italian positivist school and a symbol of opposition to every authority that might in any way constrain the most absolute freedom of thought; to such an extent that his name, to his genuine distress, was also raised as the standard of the most outdated anticlericalism. A. expounded his philosophical thought, oriented toward English and French positivist research (Spencer and Comte), whose influence he experienced, and toward the achievements of scientific progress, in numerous volumes addressing every subject then under discussion, from psychology to cosmogony and sociology. But the epistemological and methodological cornerstones of his system rest on the asserted necessity of applying the method of the natural sciences fully to philosophy; on the principle of the natural character of every fact; on the reducibility of the essence of the ego to a pure sensory phenomenon (“everything is sensation and the grouping of sensations, and nothing more”), and this too, like its psychic manifestations, to the mere rhythm of energetic wavelengths, on purely physiological foundations.
Of evolutionism he developed above all the concept of the process from the indistinct to the distinct; in ethics and sociology he highlighted chiefly society’s function of forming moral qualities, in a disinterested manner and through suggestion, example, and habit, while religion too was reduced to these elements; indeed, in this field he defended several errors: he declared the dogma of creation puerile; maintained that spirit and matter, coexisting eternally, derive from a prior indistinct reality; and asserted that Providence is absurd, as is God’s intervention in the governance of the world. Consequently, the three works Pietro Pomponazzi (decr. 1869); La psicologia come scienza positiva (decr. 1872); La formazione naturale nel fatto del sistema solare (decr. 1879) were placed on the Index. In education he took up the concept of natural formation, on the basis of which abilities and habits are constructed and resolved into art and character through exercise conducted by scientific method, from the simple to the complex, with didactic anticipations and objective intuitions. Of his entire system, the principle of experimental methodology survives; although A. himself for the most part restricted it to the archetype of the natural sciences, it nevertheless did not remain fruitless, even outside the sphere of his school, in the development of philosophical thought, soon almost submerged by envious idealism.
Studies: M. Liberatore, in La Civ. Cattolica, 7th series, 6 (1869, II), p. 699 ff.; F. Berardinelli, ibid., 8th series, 3 (1871, III), pp. 201–11. — G. Marchesini, La vita e il pensiero di R. A., Milano 1907; G. Zamboni, Il valore scientifico del positivismo di R. A. e della sua conversione, Verona 1921; G. Marchesini, R. A.: L'uomo e l'umanità, Firenze 1922; E. Troilo, A., Milano 1926; G. Gentile, Le origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia, II: I positivisti, Messina 1927; G. Tarozzi, A., Roma 1928; F. Amerio, A., Brescia 1947. Paolo Bonatelli