To say that this book is a disappointment is not to dismiss it, but to note the author’s obvious capacity to address a significant topic in a significant way, and to regret that this was not achieved. He provides us with tools, but little is done to put them to work on the ‘information age’ of the title.

Liran Shia Gordon demonstrates a deep and fruitful knowledge of the philosophy of John Duns Scotus and an impressive sense of the place of the Franciscan friar in his intellectual history and milieu. He works with untranslated texts as well as translated ones. Many of his themes would bear productively on the ‘information age’ of the title: on the ubiquity of the computer and the growing ubiquity of artificial intelligence or machine learning. Admittedly, how to apply the material found in one or two chapters may be more difficult to see, but that is not the problem. It is rather that none of the metaphysical topics – including the many that would prove remarkably useful in thinking about these computer or information themes – are applied to any significant degree. At the end of each chapter (which average around thirteen pages) comes a single page of application to technology (sometimes less than a full page, occasionally as long as two pages). One-to-thirteen is already a low ratio, but the situation is worse than that suggests. After an average of twelve pages per chapter of erudite exposition of Scotus and his philosophical vision, these concluding sections offer no more than insubstantial generalities, not rising – to be frank – even to the level of a good journalistic treatment.

The book is a worthwhile addition to the literature on Scotus on account of the larger part of each chapter: the ‘metaphysics of creation’ of the title. By that, we mean both creation as a verb (God’s creative act) and creation as a noun (that which has been created, and its characteristics): matter, place, truth and existence, time and eternity, freedom, emotion and rationality, cause information, personhood. When it comes to making a link, to assessing the contribution of this metaphysics of creation to the information age, we are left to our own devices. To labour a point, that is a shame, because scholastic philosophy has a good deal to offer contemporary thinking about a defining aspect of our time: the information revolution. (I have tried myself to explore some of what scholastic philosophy might make of artificial intelligence or machine learning, in a couple of papers.) The majority tradition within scholastic philosophy today is Thomist. It would therefore be all the more welcome to see this work done from the somewhat more minority perspective of Scotism, but we do not get that here.

What might be done is not too difficult to discern. There is low-hanging fruit on offer here. What, for instance, might scholastic categories such as mental being or the different grades of potency offer thinking about what a computer does? Gordon does not show us. In that sense, the book does too literally what the title suggests: here is metaphysics for the information age; take it up and do with it as you will. It is not A Metaphysics of Creation Applied to the Information Age.

That so much remains unfulfilled rests, I think, on the way in which ‘information age’ is left undefined, untaxonomised, indefinite. This supports the idea that work between theology and science (or technology), is typically at its best when the science (or technology) and the theology are as specific as they can be – when, we might say, they are firm and characterful enough to be able to draw sparks from each another. We have half of that here, in that welcome delineation of a theological tradition, namely Scotism. However, on the other side, the side of that upon which Scotism is being brought to bear (or might be brought to bear), there is no delineation, no provocative specificity, no characterful detail. Particularly useful, as I see it, would have been attention to the nuts and bolts of the computing and the mathematics behind it – to what is going on ‘under the hood’ with artificial intelligence or machine learning, for instance – since it is likely to the ontology of these computer systems that the metaphysics of creation will have the most to say. Instead, we given ‘societal implications’ of the broadest sort, in so much as we are given anything.

I cannot help but think, or hope, that an attentive editor might not have let this book out before it was able more effectively to realise its promise, and to make the most of the obvious capacities of the author. A more active editorial engagement might also have addressed typos, a contradiction between pages 21 and 22, and some lack of clarity (partly of grammar, and partly conceptual – for instance, whether the argument in the second chapter is one of full-blooded panpsychism, or more of an analogy or metaphor). Also worthy of editorial attention is the fact that most of the translations of Scotus are identified at the front (in the Abbreviations) but two are placed in the bibliography (one under ‘Scotus, John Duns’, the other under ‘Duns Scotus, John’).