. Hilbert's finitist programwas not created at the beginning of the twenties solely to counteract Brouwer's intuitionism, but rather emerged out of broad philosophical reflections on the foundations of mathematics and out of detailed logical work; that is evident from notes of lecture courses that were given by Hilbert and prepared in collaboration with Bernays during the period from 1917 to 1922. These notes reveal a dialectic progression from a critical logicism through a radical constructivism toward finitism; the progression has to be seen against the background of the stunning presentation of mathematical logic in the lectures given during the winter term 1917/18. In this paper, I sketch the connection of Hilbert's considerations to issues in the foundations of mathematics during the second half of the 19th century, describe the work that laid the basis of modern mathematical logic, and analyze the first steps in the new subject of proof theory. A revision of the standar...

. After a brief flirtation with logicism in 1917--1920, David Hilbert proposed his own program in the foundations of mathematics in 1920 and developed it, in concert with collaborators such as Paul Bernays and Wilhelm Ackermann, throughout the 1920s. The two technical pillars of the project were the development of axiomatic systems for ever stronger and more comprehensive areas of mathematics and finitistic proofs of consistency of these systems. Early advances in these areas were made by Hilbert (and Bernays) in a series of lecture courses at the University of Gttingen between 1917 and 1923, and notably in Ackermann 's dissertation of 1924. The main innovation was the invention of the e-calculus, on which Hilbert's axiom systems were based, and the development of the e-substitution method as a basis for consistency proofs. The paper traces the development of the "simultaneous development of logic and mathematics" through the e-notation and provides an analysis of Ackermann's consisten...