Students will hone skills in analyzing a wide range of complex arguments and modes of expression, including literary and aesthetic idioms, which probe and expose the limits and conditions of possibility for conceptual formations, institutional establishments, disciplinary boundaries, and organizations of power. Students will develop a broad familiarity with the most enduring aspects of European thought since the eighteenth century, and they will gain a deeper understanding of especially significant movements within this tradition (such as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory). This transdisciplinary certificate program is therefore exceptionally suited not only to prepare students of literature and culture to analyze the tensions that span works of art and larger social structures, but also to prepare scientists to question, for instance, the social and conceptual presuppositions of the scientific approach to data and knowledge. In this way, the Certificate Program in European Critical Thought will affirm the central role of the humanities within the broader context of the University, and it will offer a much-needed complement to the recent investment in other areas of research at Brown, such as the newly established Data Science Institute. Thinkers to be studied on a regular basis will include, among others, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Gramsci, Heidegger, Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Arendt, Lacan, Foucault, Blanchot, Lyotard, Derrida, Cixous, and Agamben.