As a modeling framework aimed at addressing the needs of early requirements engineering, i* was inspired by concepts from a range of disciplines from distributed AI to software engineering to organization theories. With information technologies becoming ever more embedded in society and everyday life and in ever more intricate ways, the intellectual foundations that underlie requirements modeling techniques should be reviewed and updated from time to time. In this talk I will recall the concepts and ideas from various sources that provided foundations for the original i* language. Recognizing current and emerging needs, I suggest related elds and disciplines where future evolutions of social modeling languages such as i*/iStar might draw ideas from.