49. The Hole In The Sum Of Parts

Synopsis - Two American tourists in London hopped into a taxi and asked the driver for a quick tour of Oxford University in adjacent Stratford upon Avon. The driver brings them around the colleges, libraries and facilities. When back in London, the tourists accuse him of not showing them the university, just buildings. What makes a university?

Gilbert Ryle calls this a category mistake where one associates a concept for tangible material entities. A university isn't one building but more than a space for higher learning. A collection of colleges perhaps. That's it. So the biggest error that the American tourists made was in thinking Oxford university was represented by one building. But the more confusing issue is the case of a university being neither a material or immaterial thing. It is a real word that represents an idea that comprises many tangible things.

Right off Wikipedia, the word university is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning "community of teachers and scholars.", and not buildings. Over time, we've come to designate physical space to universities and that's what perhaps makes for some twist in meaning. Of course a university needs buildings, libraries and lecture theatres and things but these are extensions of the idea. Couldn't this community of scholars not just talk under a tree?

So no one's really wrong here, just not quite totally right.