search_texts
Find specific ideas in 4.6 million text chunks from classical philosophy and humanities works. Submit a natural language query to retrieve relevant excerpts with metadata.
Instructions
Search 4.6 million classical philosophy and humanities texts from Archive.org.
The collection contains public domain books (pre-1928) covering:
Philosophy: Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Mill, Wittgenstein, Aquinas and many more
Ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, logic, political philosophy
Sacred and religious texts, stoicism, neoplatonism, existentialism
Classical literature, history of ideas, social theory
Sources: Internet Archive (americana, europeanlibraries, gutenberg)
Texts are in original languages — primarily English, German, Latin, French, Italian, Greek, Russian. Queries in any language work due to multilingual embeddings.
Args: query: What you are looking for, e.g. 'Nietzsche will to power eternal recurrence', 'Kantian categorical imperative duty ethics', 'Platonic theory of forms and the Good', 'Stoic virtue and the sage', 'Aristotle eudaimonia flourishing', 'Hegel dialectics spirit history', 'free will determinism compatibilism' author: Optional — filter results to a specific author/creator, e.g. 'Kant', 'Nietzsche', 'Aristotle'. Case-insensitive substring match. language: Optional — filter by language code, e.g. 'eng', 'ger', 'lat', 'fre', 'ita', 'gre', 'rus' limit: Number of results after reranking (default 5, max 20)
Returns: List of relevant text excerpts with metadata, reranked by relevance. Each result includes rerank_score, vector_score, title, creator, date, language, subject and the full text chunk.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| query | Yes | What you are looking for, e.g. 'Nietzsche will to power', 'Kantian categorical imperative', 'Platonic theory of forms', 'Stoic virtue and the sage' | |
| author | No | Filter results to a specific author/creator, e.g. 'Kant', 'Nietzsche', 'Aristotle'. Case-insensitive substring match. | |
| language | No | Filter by language code: 'eng', 'ger', 'lat', 'fre', 'ita', 'gre', 'rus' | |
| limit | No | Number of results after reranking (default 5, max 20) |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| result | Yes |