Jean-Jacques Rousseau is, as Luis Antonio Velasco points out in the interview in this issue, a philosopher that many know and even read at some point in their life. From law to biology, through pedagogy, the different arts, literature, politics, sociology and, of course, philosophy itself, readers have visited Rousseau’s ideas. His thought also appears in the classes of secondary and high school students linked to the French Revolution and, inexplicably, to the Enlightenment proposal when, in reality, all his work, from his first two speeches, maintains an acid and polemical dispute with the guiding principles of the Enlightenment. He is not an easy author to understand because, although he enjoys clear writing, his reasoning tends to fall into logical knots that leave the problems raised and their solutions open, thereby accentuating the provocative nature of his proposals. This aporetic feature of his philosophy reflects and respects the essential anthropological concern of his thought: we can conclude nothing in the ways of being and doing of human beings that is not susceptible to, at least, another possible reading. And we, as readers, can see that Rousseau, from his first book, Discourse on the sciences and the arts to his last, Reveries of the solitary walker, has sustained his core philosophical concern, knowing what man is, without a definitive solution. It is a gesture of humility, nobility and remarkable intellectual perseverance.

Rousseau is not a thinker who has been recovered by the philosophy of the 20th century and so far in the 21st. His thought, however, remains valid. Why? In this issue of INTER DISCIPLINA we outline some probable answers to this question, and we do so from different disciplinary fronts. The philosophical answers are found in the essay by Antonio Marino López and in the interview with Luis Antonio Velasco; the historical ones, in the work of Fernanda Valencia Suárez; the literary ones, in the one by Romina España, and, the aesthetic ones, in the essay by Carolina Depetris. The comentary of the book of Lacoue-Labarthe, by Selma Rodal Linares, reviews the relationship that art has with politics in Rousseau. We wanted, with this interdisciplinary reading, to honor the breadth of his thought. Added to this perspective is another one marked by distance, since the scholars participating in this issue work off central campus of UNAM, the Faculty of Higher Studies in Acatlán, and the Peninsular Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, in Mérida.

Rousseau, as we will see in the essays that follow, was a philosopher who found in freedom the maximum value of human ontology. In our current historical reality, where we see, reiterated throughout the world, the absence of tolerance and respect for the essential freedom of the human being that Rousseau already denounced, we must recover the thought of him and sustain the necessary validity of him. This is, in short, the intention of this issue of INTER DISCIPLINA.