It is not exclusive to those already steeped in either discipline denoted by the title. The book is a model of what in today's academic world we call "accessibility". There are points where the reader may wonder why the opposite direction of explanation is not considered more explicitly. Indeed that scope may be even wider than Nanay claims. This is an exciting and surely fruitful approach, with a wide scope of value.
The lessons that we are supposed to learn are for theories of aesthetics, gotten by appeal to perception-studies. So, finally to an important disambiguation, the approach of the book is to employ philosophy of perception as a way of doing (some) aesthetics, rather than to employ aesthetics as a way of doing philosophy of perception. And because Nanay understands the analysanda of philosophy of perception broadly, his strategy is to employ the "conceptual apparatus" of that discipline to offer novel analyses of questions not just about the experiences we count as "aesthetic", but also a range of other related phenomena that traditionally fall under the aesthetic. Those caveats offered and notwithstanding, he writes "it shouldn't sound surprising that it is a promising avenue of research to consider debates and problems in aesthetics to be really about the branch of philosophy that is about experiences, namely, philosophy of perception" (10). Nanay carefully emphasizes that there are questions in aesthetics not fully or helpfully answered by doing philosophy of perception, and that not all matters aesthetic are perceptual. Accordingly, questions in philosophy of perception concern not just those about senses like vision and audition, but also about imagery, possible top-down and cross-modal effects, and attention. With regard to 'philosophy of perception', he is again liberal, understanding 'perception' to denote more than just pure sensory experience (supposing that there is such a thing). So, aesthetics has its roots in studies of beauty but also, and importantly for Nanay's choice of emphases, concerns apparently special ways that we mentally take up objects and events (and not just artworks): experience, attitude, judgment, evaluation, attribution. With regard to 'aesthetics', Nanay resists any sharp delineation of relevant topics, while insisting on a distinction between aesthetics and philosophy of art.
The title of Bence Nanay's monograph is provocative, and partly, but not only, because it is nicely ambiguous.
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