This thesis was conducted to determine the real content of a book of questionableidentity. To do this we proceed in two steps: At first with a complete reconstructionof the biography and the complete work, inclusive some inedited documents,of the author the german philosopher and pedagogue Gottfried Winkler (1739-1814).Indeed the father of the freemason and librettist Theodor Hell (1775-1856) is consideredtoday as a simple editor of the wellknown theologian Johann Lorenz Mosheim(1693-1755). The reason for this « reductio ad Mosheimium » of his work is probablydue to a false interpretation of his philosophical position, as the consequence of aspecial writing technic used by Winkler.So, in a second step, we tried to elaborate a decoding system, which shouldallow us to understand the content « between the lines », as the philosopher LeoStrauss defined it in his essay Persecution and the Art of Writing, of Winklers mainwork. This new approach of understanding Winklers writing with our « post-straussian» hermeneutical system, enriched by modern anthropological, sociologicaland philosophical principles, sets itself the goal to answer the main question of ourthesis:Was Winkler really just an editor of Mosheim or perhaps representative foran underground free-thinker generation at the dawn of a new century, torn betweenthe need of freedom of thinking and the fear of persecution ?
