Content
# Alexandria MCP Server
[](https://codeguilds.dev/packages/alexandria-mcp)
Semantic search over **4.6 million text chunks** from 20,000+ classical philosophy and humanities works. Built for AI agents using [FastMCP](https://github.com/jlowin/fastmcp) over HTTP.
## What's in the collection
All texts are public domain (pre-1928), sourced from [Internet Archive](https://archive.org) (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):**
```bash
claude mcp add --transport http alexandria https://alexandria.aidatanorge.no/mcp
```
**Via MCP config:**
```json
{
"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 |
| `author` | string | Optional filter by author/creator, e.g. `Kant`, `Nietzsche`, `Plato` |
| `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`.
**curl example:**
```bash
curl -X POST https://alexandria.aidatanorge.no/mcp \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Accept: application/json, text/event-stream" \
-d '{
"jsonrpc": "2.0",
"id": 1,
"method": "tools/call",
"params": {
"name": "search_texts",
"arguments": {
"query": "Kantian categorical imperative duty ethics",
"author": "Kant",
"limit": 3
}
}
}'
```
### `get_book_list`
List books in the collection filtered by author, subject or language.
| Parameter | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| `author` | string | Filter by author/creator, e.g. `Kant`, `Plato` |
| `subject` | string | Filter by subject keyword, e.g. `ethics`, `logic` |
| `language` | string | Filter by language code: `eng`, `ger`, `lat`, `fre`, `ita`, `gre`, `rus` |
| `limit` | int | Max books to return (default 20, max 100) |
**curl example:**
```bash
curl -X POST https://alexandria.aidatanorge.no/mcp \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Accept: application/json, text/event-stream" \
-d '{
"jsonrpc": "2.0",
"id": 2,
"method": "tools/call",
"params": {
"name": "get_book_list",
"arguments": {"author": "Plato", "language": "eng"}
}
}'
```
### `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.
```bash
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
