Roberto Ardigò

Roberto Felice Ardigò (28 January 1828 – 15 September 1920) was an Italian philosopher. He was an influential leader of Italian positivism and former Catholic priest.

Ardigò was born in Casteldidone, in what is now the province of Cremona, Lombardy. He resigned from the Church in 1871 after abandoning theology in 1869. He was appointed a professor of theology at the University of Padua in 1881 in a time when a reaction to idealism had taken place in the philosophic circles.

Inspired by Auguste Comte, Ardigò differed from his mentor in that he considered thought more important than matter and insisted on psychological disquisitions. He believed thought was dominate in every action and the result of every action, and disappears only in a state of general corruption.

He died in Mantova in 1920.

Works

• Psychology as a Positive Science (1870)
• The Moral of the Positivists (1879).