Finding Oneself in God: Scientia Intuitiva as a Metaphysically Self-Locating Thought

In "Finding oneself in God," I argue that we should understand scientia intuitiva as a “metaphysically locating” thought. Physically locating thoughts are familiar: when I wake up and realize, in a flash, that I am in Berkeley, I connect my felt experiences with a non-perspectival description of a place. The metaphysically locating thought of scientia intuitiva also involves connecting felt experiences to a non-perspectival description. When I enjoy scientia intuitiva, I realize, in a flash, that I am as things are described in the monist system of the Ethics: I am such that I can be understood as a mind or body, as a modification of God’s eternal and infinite reality or as a temporally and spatially limited finite thing. I explain how, if scientia intuitiva is what I think it is, it can be characterized as exploiting, in one intuition, the power of two specific Cartesian intuitions: the cogito and the Fifth Meditation’s ontological argument (with some alterations to the ideas involved, of course).