Ernst Kapp

Ernst Christian Kapp (15 October 1808 – 30 January 1896) was a German-American philosopher of technology and geographer, and a follower of Carl Ritter.

He was prosecuted for sedition in the late 1840s for publishing a small article entitled 'Der konstituierte Despotismus und die konstitutionelle Freiheit' (1849) and was subsequently forced to leave Germany.

He then emigrated to the German pioneer settlements of central Texas where he worked as a farmer, geographer and inventor.

This work, among many other things, formulates a philosophy of technology in which tools and weapons are identified as different forms of 'organ projections', although this idea may have been loosely covered as early as Aristotle.

Furthermore, in chapters 12 & 13, it notably analyses language and the state as extensions of mental life, long before such ideas were popularised by Marshall McLuhan.