Ernst Kapp

Ernst Kapp's 1877 book coined the term 'philosophy of technology' and advanced the first systematic biological theory of invention. His organ-projection thesis holds that every tool or machine is, at its origin, an unconscious extrapolation of a bodily organ. The bent finger suggests the hook; the cupped palm suggests the bowl; the arm and its joints suggest the crane. The railway, Kapp argued, mirrors the system of veins and arteries; the telegraph mirrors the nervous system. This is not mere metaphor: Kapp means that the inventor, working intuitively rather than deductively, reaches into the body's architecture and casts it outward in durable material form.

Kapp's importance extends beyond his specific thesis. He posed the question that would preoccupy later philosophers — Leroi-Gourhan, Stiegler, McLuhan — in its starkest form: what is the relationship between the human organism and the technical objects it produces? His answer, that tools are the body made external and durable, implies that the history of technology is simultaneously a history of self-knowledge. Civilization, on this view, is the accumulated set of unconscious self-portraits that humanity has made of itself in iron, glass, and wire. The origin of any particular technology, for Kapp, is always a bodily prototype — an organ that the hand or mind recognized before the workshop could articulate it.