Background
Roberto Ardigò was born on January 28, 1828, in Casteldidone, Italy. He was the son of Ferdinando Ardigò and Angela Tabaglio. He also had a sister.
Roberto Ardigò was born on January 28, 1828, in Casteldidone, Italy. He was the son of Ferdinando Ardigò and Angela Tabaglio. He also had a sister.
Roberto Ardigò attended school in Mantua and later studied theology at the seminary of Mantua.
Roberto Ardigò was ordained a priest in 1851. Later he taught at the Lyceum of Mantua and theological seminaries. In 1871, Ardigò resigned from the Church after abandoning theology and faith in 1869. In 1881, he took up a post of a professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Padua. He held this post until 1909, besides he served as dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters from 1899 to 1902. In 1913, he was appointed to the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy, but he couldn't get to Rome in order to take an oath.
Roberto Ardigò published his first book Discorso su Pietro Pomponazzi in 1869. Later he wrote such books as La morale dei positivisti, La psicologia come scienza positiva and Scritti vari.
(Italian edition)
1879Roberto Ardigò was the chief representative of positivism in Italy. However, he disagreed with such positivists as Spencer. Spencer argued that philosophy does not have its own subject matter but is reducible to the particular sciences. Ardigo thought that philosophy was not merely the collection of these sciences. Ardigo like many positivists was skeptical about free will. He wished, however, to mitigate the determinism of many positivists, and believed in a degree of unpredictable change in sequences of events. He said that chance consists of the intersecting of various causal series that, taken together, constitute the order of the universe. These intersections are unpredictable, though the events that constitute every individual series are not unpredictable. According to Ardigò, human "freedom" is an effect of the plurality of the psychical series, that is, of the multiplicity of the possible combinations of various causal orderings that constitute man's psychical life
In the moral domain, Roberto Ardigò carried on a polemic against every kind of religious and rationalistic ethics. It is a fact, according to Ardigò, that humans are capable of disinterested or altruistic actions, but such actions can be explained by recourse to natural and social factors. The ideals and the prescriptive maxims that determine them derive from the reactions of society to acts that either preserve or damage it – reactions that impress the individual and become fixed in his conscience as norms or moral imperatives.