Ardigò, Roberto (1828–1920)

Roberto Ardigò was the most prominent Italian philosopher of the nineteenth century. A priest and an academic, he was subjected to an ecclesiastical trial for his naturalistic philosophy and dismissed from the priesthood. Ardigò symbolized secularism and the conflict between the liberal state and the Roman Church, which marked Italian politics and culture from the Risorgimento to the end of the century. A positivist philosopher, he advocated an empirical and materialistic explanation of all phenomena and revived Renaissance humanism and naturalism.