He obtained a degree in Historical and Philosophical Sciences in 1946, and became assistant to the Faculty of Arts between 1947 and 1953, working with Joaquim de Carvalho.

On November 28, 2015, the City Hall of Coimbra created the Sala Eduardo Lourenço, in the Casa da Escrita, destined to house about 3000 books of his.

Influenced by the reading of Husserl, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre or by knowledge of the works of Dostoievski, Franz Kafka or Albert Camus, he was associated to a certain extent with existentialism, especially around the 1950s, when he collaborated in the Árvore and became a friend of Vergílio Ferreira.

A literary critic and essayist predominantly focused on poetry, he signed controversial essays such as Presença or Contra-Revolução do Modernismo Português?

Indifferent to the succession of theoretical currents, and escaping both historicism and supposed objective analyses, Lourenço's perspective has already influenced other authors, such as, for example, Eduardo Prado Coelho, and is enunciated in a central book, Tempo e Poesia (1974).