Here we have a question of values that empirical inquiry alone is unable to decide without appeal to philosophical thinking.
Explanations depend on laws, and the notion of law is to be explicated without appeal to suspect notions such as natural necessity.
Some of the time, I think they mean just atheism or practical agnosticism (i.e., living without appeal to, or belief in, supernatural agency).
The goal of phenomenology was to describe as exactly as possible the phenomena and structures of conscious experience without appeal to philosophical or scientific preconceptions about their nature, origin, or cause.
For example, Locke agreed with Descartes that each person can know immediately and without appeal to any further evidence that he exists at the time that he considers it.
Weber seems to have meant that without God or religion modern man moves in a rational, scientific world, without appeal to the supernatural and salvific, and is perhaps condemned to search fruitlessly for a meaning that was once vouchsafed to religious believers.
Psychological behaviorism is associationism without appeal to mental events.
In turn, this organized matter itself is unintelligible without appeal to purpose and design terms.
