alexandria-mcp

Alexandria MCP Server


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): ``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.

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