<i>Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals</i> in Anton Chekhov's <i>Three Sisters</i>

Abstract This essay focuses on Iris Murdoch's final book of philosophy, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals , and Anton Chekhov's final and greatest play, Three Sisters. The essay uses Murdoch's ideas to present a new reading of Three Sisters as a working‐out of a metaphysics by which people find the breaks, the limits, of their pictures of the world and seek other pictures that reveal more of the world, but that are broken in their own ways. At the same time, the essay uses Three Sisters to develop Murdoch's account of the temporal dimensions of a metaphysics that moves through the breaks of different pictures of the world. At the end of Chekhov's play, when the eldest sister breaks out of her old picture, she must imagine her past, present and future in a new way. To try to picture the world anew, the essay argues, is to endeavour, but never with full success, to piece time together.