A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists/Ardigó, Professor Roberto
Ardigó, Professor Roberto, Italian philosopher. B. Jan. 28, 1828. He became a Catholic priest (1851) and canon of Mantua Cathedral (1863), but a profound study of philosophy emancipated him, and he left the Church in 1870 to become the most learned and most honoured leader of the Italian Positivists. In 1881 he was appointed to the chair of philosophy at Padua University, though the clergy denounced this "glorification of Atheism." Ardigo was a man of austere and lofty ideals and an original thinker. His works (Opere filosofiche, 11 vols., 1882-1912) show a rejection throughout of all religious ideas, except in the Positivist sense. See Prof. G. Marchesini, La Vita e il Pensiero di E. Ardigó (1907). D. Feb., 1906.