Alexandria

Semantic search over 4.6 million text chunks from 20,000+ classical philosophy and humanities works. Built for AI agents using FastMCP over HTTP.

What's in the collection

All texts are public domain (pre-1928), sourced from Internet Archive (americana, europeanlibraries, gutenberg collections).

• Philosophy: Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Mill, Wittgenstein, Aquinas, Augustine, Leibniz, Rousseau, Voltaire, Marx, and hundreds more
• Topics: Ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, logic, political philosophy, theology, stoicism, neoplatonism, existentialism, history of ideas
• Languages: English, German, Latin, French, Italian, Greek, Russian

Connecting to the server

Remote (hosted):

claude mcp add --transport http alexandria https://alexandria.aidatanorge.no/mcp

Via MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "alexandria": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://alexandria.aidatanorge.no/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Tools

search_texts

Search the collection using natural language. Uses hybrid dense+sparse retrieval with cross-encoder reranking.

Parameter	Type	Description
query	string	What you are looking for
language	string	Optional language filter: eng, ger, lat, fre, ita, gre, rus
limit	int	Number of results (default 5, max 20)

Example queries:

• "Nietzsche will to power eternal recurrence"
• "Kantian categorical imperative duty"
• "Platonic theory of forms and the Good"
• "Stoic virtue and the sage"
• "Hegel dialectics spirit history"

Each result includes: title, creator, date, language, subject, text (chunk), rerank_score, vector_score.

ping

Connectivity test.

Prompts

• philosopher_analysis(philosopher) — deep dive into a philosopher's key ideas
• topic_exploration(topic) — explore a topic across multiple thinkers
• compare_philosophers(philosopher_a, philosopher_b, topic) — compare two philosophers on a specific topic

Architecture

Archive.org (13,000+ books)
        ↓
  Text extraction + chunking
        ↓
  Qdrant (4.6M vectors)
        ↓
  Hybrid search: intfloat/multilingual-e5-large (dense) + Qdrant/bm25 (sparse)
        ↓
  Cross-encoder reranking: mmarco-mMiniLMv2-L12-H384-v1
        ↓
  FastMCP 3.2 over HTTP

Self-hosting

Requires a running Qdrant instance with the alexandria collection populated.

pip install -r requirements.txt
python alexandria_mcp_server.py
# Server starts at http://localhost:8005/mcp

Environment variables (optional):

QDRANT_HOST=localhost
QDRANT_PORT=6333
MCP_PORT=8005

License

MIT