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

Related MCP server: OpenEnded Philosophy MCP Server

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.

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:

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.

curl example:

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