The reason I addressed the problem to Hartshorne initially is that, from one end of his thought to the other, he has made strong claims in behalf of his use, presumably in contrast to that of some other speculative philosophers, of modern formal logic, and I wanted to assure myself that he was
under no illusion concerning the status accorded formal logic by many logicians and the force of the attempts to have, in Ernest Nagel's expression, «logic without ontology.»
This notion of freedom from the past does not in my opinion lack a qualitative reference, for it is
concerned with my own particular past, with what I have made of my self
under the
illusion that self - hood is something to be achieved by my own efforts.