A significant methodological difference between analytic and continental philosophers comes out in their differing attitudes to transcendental reasoning. It has been an object of concern to analytic philosophy since the dawn of the movement around the start of the twentieth century, and although there was briefly a mini industry on the validity of transcendental arguments following Peter Strawson's prominent use of them, discussion of their acceptability – usually with a negative verdict – is far more common than their positive use within a philosophical system or to justify a specific claim. By contrast, in the continental traditions starting with Kant but enduring throughout the twentieth century and beyond, some form of transcendental reasoning is close to ubiquitous (some of the structuralists might be exceptions), notwithstanding that what one means by the transcendental is significantly reconfigured by phenomenology, and then the genealogical turn, as well as by a more constructivist understanding of philosophy in which its value is seen as partly bound up with the transformative potential of concept creation. Concerns about the status of transcendental reasoning certainly exist for continental philosophers, but continued creative use persists, and there is no general agreement that transcendental argumentation is especially problematic. In fact, it is more commonly claimed, and it is certainly frequently implied, that a transcendental dimension is of the essence of philosophy. Any philosophical activity that does not reflect on its own conditions of possibility is naive, or pre-critical, and the sometimes pilloried continental enquiries into the “problem of modernity” are but one way of attempting to reflect on the conditions of contemporary philosophical discourse, subjectivity and cultural life more generally.