Hugo Bergmann

Hugo Bergmann (Hebrew: שמואל הוגו ברגמן; December 25, 1883 – June 18, 1975) was an Israeli philosopher, born in Prague.

He was a member of the Prague intelligentsia visiting the salon group that met at the house of Berta Fanta.

Together with Martin Buber, he founded Brit Shalom, an organization espousing a binational solution for promoting the co-existence of Jews and Arabs in the State of Israel.

He was friends with Franz Kafka, who was a schoolmate of his, the philosopher Felix Weltsch, who later worked at the Hebrew University Library in Jerusalem, and Max Brod, whom he introduced to Zionism before 1910.

He wrote on the nature of quantum mechanics and causality where he interpreted spontaneity in nature with the psychological idea that the closer we come to elements in nature or components in the individual, the less tenable is strict causal determinism and the more freedom we must grant to decisive personal elements: "In corresponding areas of physics, the statistical law of averages takes on the same functions in determining temporal position and in prediction and reconstruction that the strict law of causality previously covered, but with the distinction that the individual case could be temporally located and predicted or reconstructed before, whereas now we deal only with the average."

Hugo Bergmann, 1959