Dr. Garner joined the UWG Philosophy Program in 2014 after studying at Villanova University (Ph.D. Philosophy ⇗, 2014) and Florida State University (B.A. Religion ⇗, 2005). He is originally from Bonifay, Florida. His teaching and research interests range from ancient Greek philosophy to continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and critical and comparative thought broadly (including translation thereof). His most significant research is linked below:

• Work-in-Progress:
  • Imagination and Truth (academic book; under contract). This book explores the idea that imagination’s creative power is bound up with its power to discover. It begins with the Platonic philosopher Proclus’s claim that imagination helps us grasp Forms and mediates their intelligible order with the sensuous world. Building on this ancient outlook, the book converses with a range of more recent thinkers—including Susanne Langer, Henry Corbin, Cornelius Castoriadis, Amy Kind, and others—to consider imagination not only as envisioning unrealized possibilities but also as generating and disclosing emerging truths.
• Book Published:
  • John V. Garner, The Emerging Good in Plato's Philebus (Northwestern University Press, 2017). [academic book] ⇗
• Other Research Published (selection): 
  • John V. Garner, “An Institution of Waiting: Capital Punishment in Weil and Camus,” in Re-Thinking Political Crisis and Collapse: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, eds. A. Calcagno and M. Yenson (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming). [edited book chapter]
  • John V. Garner, “Learning from Imagination: Proclus in Dialogue with a Contemporary Debate,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2025 (online first). [peer-reviewed article] ⇗
  • John V. Garner, “The Imaginal World and the Orientation of Perception: Henry Corbin and the French Phenomenological Context,” The Journal of Religion 104 (1), 2024. [peer-reviewed article] ⇗
  • John V. Garner and Christopher P. Noble, “Possibility or Necessity? On Robert Watt’s ‘Bergson on Number’,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 32 (1), 2024. [peer-reviewed article] ⇗
  • Cornelius Castoriadis, The Greek Imaginary: From Homer to Heraclitus, Seminars 1982–1983, co-trans. John V. Garner and M.-C. Garrido Sierralta (includes translator's “Foreword”) (Edinburgh UP, 2023). [book translation] ⇗ 
  • John V. Garner, “Creative Discovery: Proclus and Plato on the Emergence of Scientific Precision,” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (2), 2020. [peer-reviewed article] ⇗
  • John V. Garner, "Foreword," in Cornelius Castoriadis, Democracy and Relativism: A Debate, trans. John V. Garner (RLI, 2019). [book foreword] ⇗
  • John V. Garner, “Thinking Beyond Identity: Numbers and the Identity of Indiscernibles in Plato and Proclus,” Idealistic Studies 47 (1/2), 2017. [peer-reviewed article] ⇗
  • John V. Garner, “Gadamer and the Lessons of Arithmetic in Plato’s Hippias Major,” META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy 9 (1), 2017. [peer-reviewed article] ⇗
• For complete works, see Garner's CV. ⇗