Abstract
This paper aims to justify, elucidate and critically assess a rather elliptical slogan "about the primacy of practice", which represents in the eyes of many American interpreters the common denominator of Heideggerian phenomenology and pragmatism in a broad sense of the term. From my perspective, Heidegger's insistence on the primordial practical association with things is not to be understood as an inversion of the traditional hierarchy, according to which we have to know the world prior to acting upon it, but rather as an integral part of his attempt to rebuild the ontological framework, in which the question of primary practice or theory used to be formulated.
I will then show the connection between Heidegger's original account of practice and his intention to revise both the notion of the "things themselves" and the notion of the entity that we ourselves are. Finally, I will justify my reluctance towards the claim common to Dreyfus', Okrent's and Blattner's interpretations, according to which the intelligibility of both human life and world is to be understood as something derivative from our everyday coping with the surrounding world.