It is often thought that "pragmatic thinking" is peculiar to American thought whereas phenomenology and existentialism are typically "Continental" in origin and content. In this paper I want to show that despite the differences, which I do not deny, there are striking similarities to be found in the works of Dewey, the pragmatist, and Heidegger, the phenomenological existentialist. The aim is to show the pragmatic element in Heidegger's works which has been overlooked so far. But it should also come out that Heidegger's preoccupation with fundamental ontology is somewhat mirrored in Dewey's attempt to retrieve primary experience. The "pragmatic element" enters the scene only after these problems have been exposed, thus showing, as I hope, that this parallelism between Heidegger and Dewey is not just a superficial one.