About
Falsafa
A reading platform for translated philosophical and classical works, plus an open-source MCP engine that lets any LLM query the corpus as a knowledge resource.
Why it exists
Every classical text that survives was carried: translated, copied, revised and cited by people with names, for reasons of their own. Falsafa carries that practice to the newest readers, human and machine. The argument is made at book length in Carried Across: how ideas travel, and the evidence behind it, fourteen books traced across a thousand years of named carriers, lives in the atlas. The engineering that follows from the argument is in the engine room.
What's in the catalog
949 works, 9,124 logical chapters, 16,433 language variants. The corpus spans Anglo-Saxon Christian poetry (Cynewulf), Urdu ghazal masters (Ghalib, Iqbal, Zauq), French Enlightenment political theory (Comte, Dunoyer), German philosophical writing (Fichte), Sanskrit smṛti traditions, and Old Javanese / Kawi tattva texts. Most works ship with 2-3 variants — original-language source, Latin-script transliteration, and English translation. Live counts at /numbers.
Sources
The source texts the corpus is built from come from freely available digital archives plus carefully transcribed printed editions. We acknowledge each archive directly:
- Old English works (Cynewulf's Juliana, Elene, Andreas; the Old English Elegies) — drawn from sacred-texts.com, a long-standing public-domain archive of religious and classical literature.
- Indian texts (the Sanskrit smṛti corpus — Manusmṛti, Yājñavalkya, Viṣṇu, Nārada, Bṛhaspati, Parāśara, Aṅgirasa, and others) — drawn from GRETIL, the Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages.
- Allama Iqbal's poetry (the three parts of Bāng-i-Darā) — drawn from allamaiqbal.com, the Iqbal Academy Pakistan archive.
- Mirza Ghalib and Sheikh Ibrahim Zauq (the two Urdu diwans) — transcribed from various printed editions.
- French and German classical liberals (Charles Comte's Traité de législation and Traité de la propriété, Charles Dunoyer's Nouveau traité d'économie sociale, Fichte's Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit) — source editions drawn from David M. Hart's Digital Library of Liberty and Power, the scholarly archive that has kept the Censeur circle's books scanned, cataloged and findable. The atlas at /atlas records his role in these chains by name.
- Greek and Latin classics in English (Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid, Lucretius, Virgil) — public-domain scholarly translations drawn from the Perseus Digital Library's canonical TEI repositories (encodings CC BY-SA 4.0), each chapter linking back to its Scaife reader source.
- Modern philosophy in English (Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Schiller, Machiavelli, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, James, Russell, Dewey, Bergson and more, with German and French originals where both survive) — public-domain texts from Project Gutenberg, cleaned of the project's header and license boilerplate and split into chapters, each work linking back to its Gutenberg ebook page. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.
- Primary sources in the history of social thought (Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra; period texts of sexology and the eugenics movement) — also from Project Gutenberg. A library of the history of thought holds the primary texts of movements whose conclusions are now rejected, the same way it holds the Manusmriti: as objects of study, not endorsement. These are period documents, presented with neutral description and dated to their own time.
Where the source is freely available online and we drew from it, the link above goes directly to the archive. Where we worked from printed books, we acknowledge that here. The translations and transliterations layered on top of these sources are described in the next section.
Thothica
The translations and transliterations were produced by Thothica, an AI translation company. Thothica's pipeline draws on frontier large language models — Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT, Google's Gemini, and open-weights models via OpenRouter. Without those models, the catalog at this scale would not exist.
Every chapter page surfaces the credit verb that matches what was done — translated, transliterated, or curated.
The MCP engine
Falsafa ships an open-source MCP server (@falsafa/mcp) that
exposes the corpus as eight librarian tools — list works, list
chapters, read a chapter, get a passage, search the corpus, find
related, compare works, and read metadata. Plug it into Claude Desktop,
Cursor, Codex, or any MCP-aware client, and your chosen LLM can
navigate the catalog directly.
The MCP is a librarian, not a second LLM. Tools return text and structure; the host LLM does the reasoning. No API keys, no inference cost, no model lock-in. Inspired by Karpathy's vector-DB-less RAG gist .
The covers
Every cover is a watercolor painting produced by an agentic pipeline
(Claude Sonnet 4.6 drafts → GPT-5.5 critiques → Claude Sonnet 4.6
decides → gpt-5.4-image-2 renders). Cross-vendor critique catches
AI-slop, hedging, and palette drift before the prompt reaches the
image model. Every stage's I/O is persisted to a per-work
cover.audit.json for full reproducibility.
Series with multiple works (Cynewulf trilogy, Iqbal's three Bang-E-Dara parts, Comte's volumes, the Sanskrit smṛti corpus, the Kawi tattva corpus) share a palette + mood anchor so siblings read as related; works in different series look genuinely different.