Unless and until a physicist is a philosopher, he cannot contribute anything to physics. Newton was not a philosopher. He deprived God of the only power as Prime Mover which Greek philosophy had assigned to Him. Because Newton gave the power of motion of celestial and terrestrial bodies to matter with inherent power of gravity, thus Newton reduced God to a powerless entity somewhere and he was a believer and would go to Church also which suggests he was not a philosopher. Either Newton should have left going to Church after giving his laws/theory or he should not have given the laws/theory because his theory was philosophically incorrect. Philosophical difficulties of Newtons theory is a long discourse and would be discussed in other discussion.
Whereas Einstein was a trickster right from the start and he would also talk about God whereas he laid the foundation of physics under which there is absolutely no chance of the existence of God. This is how they were not philosophers and their contribution to physics is negative. Maxwell has done excellent work as he could do just that because at that time time was absolute but yet he gave a clue that gravitation may be an electromagnetic force and this suggests that he was the real philosopher. The proof of Einstein was a trickster, half of the tricks are described in the Rebuttal to Lann N. Ramez, the man who had accepted my open challenge to theory of relativity, and other half of the proof is in the paper titled 'Experimental & Theoretical Evidence of Fallacy of the Space-time concept and Actual State of Existence of the Physical Universe' which is available in my profile. I consider Descartes one of the great philosophers and it is he who had proposed the existence of aether and I looked for the proof of aether and finally I confirmed the existence of aether through the very experiment due to which aether was rejected. Since aether fills the space, space has to be absolute as such space cannot connected with anything like they did it by making the space-time concept and dragged the concept to Big Bang then a simple question arises as to where was aether before the Big Bang which question still stands at present as to where from Dark Matter & Dark Energy has come? Once aether is confirmed light/radiation is an electromagnetic wave motion due to the vibrations of electric dipoles of aether. With the aether the theory of relativity is baseless, E=mc^2 is fundamentally incorrect, space-time concept is absolute rubbish and all forces of nature are electromagnetic forces, Newtons incorrect laws are not universal laws, every star system has its time frame and different gravitational property depending upon the recessional motion of star system and all problems of physics are resolved. I don't believe mathematics should define physics as mathematics should be a tool in the hands of physics.