 It is therefore important to stress that an alternative history was possible, and that the Grundlagenkrise was entirely absent from Hilbert’s logical writings in 1917/18. The names of Brouwer and Weyl are nowhere mentioned. Hilbert is of course aware of the paradoxes (which he had known about since 1897), but had long believed that Zermelo’s axiomatization had shown how to avoid them. Nor do we find in his writings any quest for the “one true logic”. On the contrary. Both in 1917/18 and in the unpublished lecture notes from the early 1920s the emphasis is on using the new metalogical techniques to explore the strengths and weaknesses of a diversity of logical systems. The work is explicitly undertaken in the spirit of his studies of the axioms of geometry. He will take up a system, explore it for a while, then drop it to examine something else. In his pluralism and in his pragmatic, experimental attitude he is closer to Peirce than to the logicists.