Ernst Christian Kapp 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. He was one of the early German Free Thinkers in Sisterdale, Texas. In 1853, he was elected the President of the Freethinker abolitionist organization Der Freie Verein.

After the Civil War he left the US for a visit to Germany, but fell ill during the voyage. Urged by his physician not to risk the return trip at his age, he re-entered the academic world. Reflecting on his frontier experience, Kapp wrote Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (1877). 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, it notably analyses language and the state as extensions of mental life, long before such ideas were popularised by Marshall McLuhan.

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