What Good Is Practice?: Ontologies, Teleologies and the Problem of Institution

Abstract

In this essay I try to articulate the relationship between the ends of practice in Theodor Schatzki’s practice theory and my own understanding of goods in practice in an institutional logical approach. To do so, I return to the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger who fashioned the frame from which Schatzki has sought to theorize and locate the way he married his sociology of practice to it. I will provisionally suggest an institutional logical theory might both amend Schatzki’s understanding of the productive role of teloi and return us in a different way to the worldhood of the world by identifying the theoretical affordances and constraints that Heidegger has to offer.