Frankly, I can't make head nor tail of that definition. I do recall that our philosophy professor used as an illustration of different types of causality the act of switching on a light: material cause -- the generation power and wiring; efficient cause -- act of switching the light on; final cause -- to have light; and formal cause -- the laws of electricity.
I just can't mentally make the last jibe with the definition given.
Mad Dawgg, can you help me out?
It’s definitions like that that make scholasticism a fit object of satire!
Try this: Question: WHY is that a ‘bat’? (as in baseball).
Efficient cause : the bat factory
Material cause: Aluminum or ash wood
Final cause: That we may play baseball
Formal cause: “By virtue of ‘batness’.” (which might include maximum and minimum lengths, widths, weight etc but would be more a matter of suitability for hitting one out of the park.)
The “batness” would be the ‘specific element’, while the aluminum or ash-wood would be the less determinate element.
You could have the exact same ‘stuff’ as is currently sitting at my confuser typing this dreck, but unless it is organized a certain way and animated by a certain sort of ‘soul’ it ain’t human. So the humanness of moi (albeit much debated by, say, my wife, sometimes) is ‘communicated’ to all the ‘stuff’, and here I am!